Ok, well markets have had a couple of hours to absorb and ponder the February jobs report which of course beat handily on the headline while missing on the AHE front, a decidedly favorable outcome for stocks, given that the main risk heading in was another average hourly earnings beat.
You can delve as deeply into this as you want, but a couple of things seem pretty clear. For one thing, that goddamn headline number (the 313,000 print) is “bigly”, so you can expect a lot of crowing about it from a certain Twitter-prone “stable genius” once someone explains to him how “bigly” it in fact is. Also, it looks like there’s still some slack in the labor market and that has obvious implications for the Fed.
Still, the robust growth outlook portends a return of inflation pressures at some point, so you probably want to keep that in mind, lest you should get caught off guard again like you invariably were last month when the AHE print tanked everything.
For those of you who don’t give a shit about any of that and just want to know whether it’s safe to buy any dip that comes along, I guess the answer is “yes” (for now) although don’t forget that just because President Dennison ended up backing down from the whole “no exemptions” line on the tariffs by no means suggests we’re out of the woods on that. Just this morning, Merkel’s bloc called Trump’s tariffs (and by extension Trump himself) “absurd”, for instance.
Oh, and we still have to see how effective Powell ends up being at communicating. Forward guidance is an art not a science and then there’s the dots …. oh God, the dots.
In any event, here is some of the early analyst commentary that will of course continue to trickle in throughout the day from whoever hasn’t already headed out to the bar (which is where I would have been by now on a payrolls Friday were this two years ago).
