Expect a Strong Jobs Report This Friday

Wall Street is gearing up for the Labor Department’s next report on the jobs market which is due out this Friday. As I’ve discussed, the jobs market has become unusually closely tied to the fortunes of the stock market. Profit margins have gone as far as they can. What this economy needs is more consumers.

The jobs report normally comes out on the first Friday of the month but due to February being temporally challenged, this report will come out on March 9th.

The question is: Will we see another 200,000+ non-farm payrolls report? The current consensus expects a gain of 213,000 jobs which is a very good number.

My take is that we should expect to see a strong report this Friday. There are a few reasons why. The first is that the initial jobless claims reports have been very good recently. Also, and this may sound odd, higher gasoline prices may indicate that the economy is doing better at the ground level. We’ve also seen decent reports on housing and retail sales.

The last few jobs reports have been pretty good. The December report showed a gain of 203,000. We gained another 243,000 in January. I expect to see those numbers revised in Friday’s report.

Still, we shouldn’t get too excited. Over the last 23 months, the U.S. economy has created 3.165 million jobs. That sounds good, but in the 25 months prior to that the economy lost 8.779 million jobs. In other words, as well as we’ve done, we’ve only gained back roughly one-third the number of jobs lost.

Posted by on March 5th, 2012 at 1:51 pm


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