Name: Why March’s Hot Jobs Report Could Be Bad News For Markets and Investors
Uploaded: 2024-04-05T15:18:00Z
Duration: 17 min 24 s
Description: Higher-than-expected inflation and weak readings from business surveys have raised questions about the economy. WSJ’s Dion Rabouin explains what this latest jobs report says about the economy. Photo: Justin Sullivan

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Higher-than-expected inflation and weak readings from business surveys have raised questions about the economy. WSJ’s Dion Rabouin explains what this latest jobs report says about the economy. Photo: Justin Sullivan

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Why March’s Hot Jobs Report Could Be Bad News For Markets and Investors

Hey everyone. Welcome. I'm gonna do it three times anyway. Welcome, welcome to, "Market Takes," I'm Dion Rabouin, reporter at the Wall Street Journal. I know you could have been anywhere else, but you're here with me and I appreciate that. Today we are breaking down the March jobs report, the non-Farm Payrolls report. And man, we got an interesting one, markets reacted in a very interesting way. We are gonna talk about all that. Let's go through what we're gonna talk about. First off, we're gonna talk about what the report showed, how that compared to expectations. I think that's gonna give you a big picture overview. Then we're gonna talk about some standout numbers from the report. I dug into this report. I've been reading through it, looking at the market reaction. We're gonna talk about the big numbers in the report, the most important numbers aside from this big headline number, which is definitely worth talking about. We're gonna talk about what this means for the Federal Reserve. We're gonna look at the market reaction and of course we're gonna talk about what's next for data. Because you all know here on, "Market Takes," we are always looking forward, even though this is backward looking data. So listen, let's get into it. Let's throw a chart up here on your screen so you can see what I'm talking about when we talk about the trend, right? It's all about the trend. So this month, 303,000 jobs added, strongest report in quite some time. But what do you see there on the right side of your screen? You see those bars getting higher, right? That is an accelerating trend of job growth. We are seeing the number of jobs added pick up. So that's unusual. What usually happens when the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, is businesses struggle. They pull back on hiring and that slows down the economy. That slows down inflation. What you're seeing on your screen is not that. What you are seeing is an accelerating pace of job gains. So 303,000 jobs added in March. That was a significant number and it comes on top of an increase of 22,000 for the previous two months. So January was revised from 229,000 jobs to 256,000 jobs. February was revised down, but only by 5,000. So 270,000 jobs added. So what you see there is an acceleration from that low we hit in October, which was still right around a hundred thousand jobs added, and each month since then we have consistently added more jobs than the month before. That is an accelerating trend and if you look back, going back to 2021, right? You saw those big job gains as we were recovering from the pandemic. That was really just the economy kind of trying to get back to equilibrium. And then you see the economy slowing down. You see those job gains slowing down consistently. The bars are lower. And then as we move into 2024, you see that acceleration again, those bars are going higher. And really this chart just illustrates how we have seen over the last few months the number of job gains accelerate, which is very much not what the Federal Reserve wants to see. That's not how you get inflation down. That's not how you get consumer spending down. That's not how you get, you know, all these things that push inflation higher to come down is with this accelerating number of jobs added. And so what we're seeing right now is very different from what you usually get in a cycle like this, where the Federal Reserve at this point has raised rates to the highest level in about 23 years. Usually you see job gains slowing down, you only need about a hundred thousand jobs added to keep pace with births and folks graduating from high school and college and all those sorts of things. We are seeing about three times that. So this is a still hot labor market and a labor market that looks to be getting hotter, not cooler, not cooling off, not slowing down. That's a big deal. The trend that we're seeing right now, basically you saw it on that chart, is up and to the right. I wanna put up here on your screen right now, a quote from my man, Torsten Slok. He's the chief economist at Apollo Global Management. He talked to me on the podcast, WSJs, take on the week. This is from March 17th. So the conversation went out to y'all March 17th, that's the Sunday. Tors and I had this conversation back about March 12th, and I think my man right here was ahead of the game. The market just seemed to realize this yesterday, but Torsten saying he doesn't think the Fed's gonna cut rates at all this year because of what we're seeing in this tailwind from the stock market, from the increase in asset prices, home prices. And what we got today was a boost from the job market, the labor market being stronger than expected. We were only supposed to add about 200,000 jobs, right at 200,000 was the expectation for economists. We surpassed that by a hundred thousand. And Torsten says he thinks that's gonna keep the Fed busy battling inflation, the better part of the next six to nine months, AKA the rest of this year. Now, Torsten, if you don't know, he's one of the smartest guys on Wall Street. He's been doing it for a long time. Before he was at Apollo, he was at Deutsche Bank. His quote right here, really just illustrating that Torsten was ahead of the game and we tried to tell y'all on, "Take on the week." I've been telling y'all, if you watch, "Market Takes,' you haven't been watching, "Market Takes," you're losing, but you're here now. So, you know, we can forget about all that, but right now the labor market is picking up the stock market, the housing market, all of these things, strong, bullish sentiment from investors is putting a lot of pressure on inflation. And Torsten expressed three weeks ago, and this is a sentiment that I've had myself, I've been telling you, if you watch the last, "Market Takes," that Fed meeting, I said, what the Fed is doing is it doesn't really seem like they are talking about cutting rates in the way that the market and the way that investors are expecting and how much of this bullishness in markets really comes back to and is tied to what the Fed does, is going to be a big question. Because you know, the Fed is everything. If you watch, "Market Takes," you know, that's the biggest thing and really the most important thing in all of markets. We put out a story just this morning on WSJ, investors are the most bullish they've been since the 2021 meme stock craze. So investors are incredibly bullish. That's according to the American Association of Individual Investors. So retail traders. Now, we know that retail traders have grown to be a more important and much larger segment of the market over the past few years and we are seeing that they are the most bullish they've been since 2021. That is significant, that is meaningful. So let's dive into the numbers on this jobs report today, wages up 0.3% for the month, 4.1% year over year. That's right in line with expectations, I've seen some quotes from investors from Wall Street folks saying that wage growth is cooling, wage growth has been about four to 4.5% for about a year now. We have not seen wage growth really move outta this level. It hasn't fallen below and I don't think it's fallen below this 4.1% for quite some time, but it certainly hasn't fallen below 4%, hasn't gone above 4.3, 4.4% in quite some time. So this is really just right in line with expectation. Labor market, labor force participation, 62.7%. All that means is you've got about 62.7%. That's historically actually fairly low given where we've been and we're not seeing an acceleration, we're not seeing those folks, as they say, come in from the sidelines. People who haven't been looking for a job saying they are looking for a job. People who haven't been employed, who have been, you know, living in the basement with mom and dad or who, you know, for whatever reason, haven't been able to go out there and get and find and look for a job. They're not really coming into the labor force the way you would expect from a strong labor market like the one that we certainly had in 2023 and the one that it looks like we're having right now. So we're not seeing a lot of the typical things that you see in an environment like the one we're in. Revisions also, that was a big thing. If you remember, we did a video just about a month or so ago about the jobs market and last year in 2023, I think it was nine of the 12 months in that year were revised lower. It might even been 10, I think it was 10 outta 12 months. You had lower revisions consistently when you actually had the longest consecutive streak of negative revisions that's ever been seen in the history of the survey. So this higher revision for January really just kinda locks in. Yeah, it does seem like the labor market is getting hot and getting hotter and going to get hotter. Average hours work rose to 34.4 per week. So generally things got better, but not a lot better. No real out-performers, no huge moves up or down in any of these numbers. But what we are seeing consistently is a trend higher. And so I'd say for this report, the biggest number really was the headline number. That 303,000 jobs added coming in more than 100,000 jobs, more than what economists had expected within that 303 K you had. That's well above the 231,000 gain over the prior 12 months. And you had the big gains coming in. Healthcare, government and construction. Those industries are important. I'll tell you why. Government employment had been falling off of a cliff for quite some time. We had seen really low levels of employment in the government, those government jobs that are hard to get. Now, historically, government jobs come in a lot stronger at the beginning of the year because the government, it takes them a long time to hire and usually they're on a pretty set schedule. So when the government's gonna hire people, whether that's school teachers, whether that's, you know, administrators, folks who work in those government buildings, things like that, they're gonna do their hiring at the beginning of the year. And what they're typically gonna do is, it's a long process. It's a drawn out process. It's not something where they're gonna hire a lot of people all the time where there's a lot of movement. Usually when people get government jobs, they stay in those government jobs and that's someone who's gonna be there for quite some time. So we got 71,000, that's much higher than the average monthly gain over the past 12 months of 54,000 in the government. The private sector did add 232,000 jobs. That was very strong as well. The other piece of that construction, adding 39,000 jobs, that's about double the average monthly gain seen in the past 12 months. That's a good sign for the housing market, which also has been red hot on the price side, but also in terms of folks buying homes. Again, if you remember what my man Torsten Slok said, he said the rise in stock prices, the rise in home prices, those things are gonna get folks, you know, more bullish about the economy. When people see the value of their home rise, well they think, oh man, I got so much money, let me go out and let me buy this new couch. Let me go out and spend more money. Let me, you know, maybe I wanna take on a home equity loan, home equity line of credit so I can add a patio, a deck, things like that. So you know, it's what they call the wealth effect. You don't actually have more money in your bank account, but your 401k is looking good. The price in your house is looking good. And those things motivate people to spend more. And when folks spend more, companies raise prices, inflation goes up. We've seen this movie before. So keep an eye on those things. Really quickly let's talk about what this means for the Fed, because as I've said, that's the whole ball game. Everything is about the Fed. Market sold off yesterday on Thursday, because people finally kind of came to the realization of what Jerome Powell has been saying over and over and over again in his press conferences, at media appearances, in his speeches. He's saying, listen, right now I know y'all think we're gonna cut interest rates and we might do that, but we might not. We might just not. It might be appropriate to leave rates right where they are at 5.25 to 5.5% at this restrictive level. Yeah, small businesses are hurting right now, we're seeing that. We're seeing the NFIB small business confidence survey at historic lows. We know that it's a tough environment out there, but we're not seeing the consumer slow down. We're not seeing really any confidence that inflation data is going to fall to a level that's consistent and appropriate with what we want, which is 2%, not three, we want two. And that's what he's been saying. And then we heard from Atlanta Fed, president, Raphael Bostic and a few others, that maybe we only need one rate cut this year, maybe we only need two rate cuts this year. The market coming into this year priced in six cuts, when the Fed lowers rates by six cuts, as in, you know, that's gonna be about 150 basis points. That's meaningful, that's a lot lower rates that really kind of takes the pressure off those small businesses and consumers and folks who are thinking about, you know, refinancing, who are thinking about maybe taking out a home equity line of credit, for businesses that need to roll over their debt, borrow more money. That takes a lot of pressure off and makes those things a lot cheaper. It's also great for the stock market. Well if the Fed's only gonna cut one time or maybe not at all, that changes the calculus for a lot of things in the economy and that's what we're seeing. But again, this all comes back to inflation. So let's actually throw another chart up here on your screen so you can see what's happening with inflation. This is CPI, the consumer price index. And what we saw from mid 2022, June, 2022, when inflation got to 9% on CPI to about midway through last year, 2023, was just inflation coming down every month, inflation lower than the month before. And then we saw a bit of an acceleration and now we're seeing inflation kind of stall out. That's what you see, inflation right there, right around 3% on the headline number, that just illustrating that what we're not seeing is consistent lower inflation. The Fed says we want to see inflation coming in consistently lower. We wanna see lower inflation, not the same, not, you know, carrying on at this level around 3% 'cause we don't want three, we want two. We need to see that happening and that's not happening. A big part of that has been gas prices. Let's throw another chart up here on your screen so you can see what I'm talking about in terms of the movement of gas prices. Now these are gasoline futures in the RBOB continuous contract, but they align pretty well with what gas prices are at the pump. And what you see right there is just the trend, don't focus too much on the price, because this is about what traders are doing on the commodity markets. But what you see there is a very clear trend. Gas prices going up, starting about 210 on this contract, going up to about 280 over the course of the four months in this year. And that just illustrates again, gasoline prices and oil prices overall, that's heating oil, natural gas, all those things had been bringing inflation down. They had been weighing down overall inflation. If gas prices continue to rise, if you continue to see higher gas prices, well that could push inflation back up and gas and oil could start to actually be a push higher instead of a pull lower on inflation. And you could start to see us move again away from 3%, maybe back to three point half, maybe back to four. And then maybe the Fed has to think about raising rates again. And that completely flips the narrative on its head. That's something to keep in mind and look out for. Let's talk about what's going on in the market today, because then this really gets to a theme that we are seeing. And that's bullishness, which is what Torsten Slok talked about. You see there, the Dow, the SNP, the NASDAQ all rising higher, all really kind of shaken off this unemployment report, or excuse me, all shaken off this jobs report. When you look at the stock market, look at that, the Dow, the NASDAQ, the S&P, and again, this is a bit of bounce back from yesterday, but you do see very clearly that bullishness. Now let's take a look at bonds. If you know Market Takes, you know, I'm always telling you, watch the bond market. That's the real market. And what we see is a big move higher as soon as that jobs report comes out. So this is the 10 year note, the most traded jobs report was out here. Boom! You just see it jump off and now we're coming back from that, investors saying, oh, well maybe I wanna actually buy bonds because maybe things are moving in a different direction than what I expected. Here's the two year note right here, what you see, and it's kind of, it's doing the same thing that's most tied to Fed expectations. As you're looking at commodities, let's take on that a little bit. You see those crude features kind of holding their level, but let's look at the year to date move, boom, right there. Just what you were seeing overall. And when we look at the currency market, we're seeing the dollar as the euro moving lower. That means the dollar is moving higher, WSJ dollar index, but that's moving kind of right along with those bond yields. So that, just illustrating that investors are pretty bullish. We're seeing bond yields rise, we're seeing stock prices move higher. The bond yields I think are in line with this idea that the Fed is gonna raise rates or not raise rates, excuse me, the Fed might not be cutting rates later this year. There could be fewer cuts. The stock market seems to be kind of shrugging that off. Hey, let's buy stocks BTFD, buy the dip and get paid on stocks. So here's what to watch for up next, we've got the NFIB Small Business Optimism survey, that's out on Monday. Keep your eyes on that because small businesses have been hurting in this environment and they could be in this environment for longer now that we see this data. So NFIB, small Business Optimism survey on Monday, CPI is out on Wednesday. We will be right here on, "Market Takes," breaking that down for you, telling you everything that was in the data, what the most important things were to watch there, and you know, kind of just explaining what happens, making it make sense a little bit there. Now the other piece you get is PPI, Producer Price Index, as in what were businesses paying. That report's gonna be out on Thursday the following day. Make sure to check that out, keep your eyes on that. And for more, check out my podcast WSJs Take on the week, we cut through the noise to explain the major business and financial news that moves markets. Also, you can make smarter investing decisions, subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And that's gonna do it for us here on, "Market Takes." I'm Dion Rabouin, reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Hope you come back and do it with us next time.

Why March’s Hot Jobs Report Could Be Bad News for Markets

Dion Rabouin breaks down all things finance, taking a deep dive into what’s making money move and why it matters.