WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – After a week full of GameStop drama, the upcoming week’s data doesn’t seem to have nearly as much surprise potential, including the jobs report which few expect to contain much good news.
Friday’s employment situation report is unlikely to paint a picture much different than the broad outlines depicted by the weekly initial jobless claims reports. For the Jan 9, week, close to the month’s Bureau of Labor Statistics snapshot point, there were 18.282 million people claiming benefits in all programs 2.2 million more than the previous week.
The December jobs report said 15.8 million people reported their employer closed or lost business they worked for, up from 14.8 million the month before. Those kinds of massive unemployment numbers don’t turn around quickly and relatively small month-to-month changes dwindle into insignificance.
The December and November unemployment rate of 6.7% is actually a lot higher according to no less an authority than Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell in his Wednesday news conference.
”The real unemployment rate is close to 10 percent,” Powell said, referring to the added burden of those not counted as unemployed, the 2.3 million people who have dropped out of the labor force since the pandemic hit.
He stressed there are no shortcuts back to full employment. “And so you’re just going to have to defeat the pandemic,” he said. He also mentioned the purchasing managers indices have also shown a lot of people are surviving the pandemic economically just fine.
“There’s been a lot of adapting and — but you can’t adapt,” he said, if you work at “hotels, sporting venues, movie theaters, restaurants, bars … that’s, again, millions and millions of people.”
Those purchasing managers reports arrive in the coming week, with the manufacturing ISM and Markit measures of momentum on Monday, followed by those for services on Wednesday. The week’s full schedule of indicators is below.
Thursday has December factory orders, including the revised durables figure. Along with the jobs report Friday morning will be the latest international trade deficit tally.
As for excitement, market participants are wondering when the second half of the Reddit/GameStop story happens, when all the Robinhood and other opportunistic traders decide to sell. Will it be a nice orderly phased exit in those 13 or so names with elevated valuations or will it be a pell-mell rush for the exits?
Upcoming Economic Data
Monday Feb 1 – 9:45a ET US Markit Mfg Index
Monday Feb 1 – 10:00a US Construction Spending
Monday Feb 1 – 10:00a US ISM Manufacturing index
Tuesday Feb 2 – 8:55a Redbook Wkly Same-Store retail sales
Wednesday Feb 3 – 7:00a US MBA wkly mortgage applications
Wednesday Feb 3 – 8:15a ADP/Moody’s Analytics Jan priv payrolls
Wednesday Feb 3 – 9:45a US Markit Services Index
Wednesday Feb 3 – 10:00a US ISM Non-Manufacturing Index
Wednesday Feb 3 – 10:30a US EIA oil stocks
Thursday, Feb 4 – 7:30a Challenger layoffs report
Thursday, Feb 4 – 8:30a US 4Q preliminary productivity
Thursday, Feb 4 – 8:30a US wkly initial jobless benefit claims
Thursday, Feb 4 – 10:00a US factory orders, revised durables
Friday, Feb 5 – 8:30a US monthly jobs report
Friday, Feb 5 – 1:00p Baker-Hughes oil/gas rig count
Friday, Feb 5 – 3:00p Federal Reserve’s monthly consumer credit
Separately, from Extract Analytics, the outlook for next week’s SPX:
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Contact this reporter: denny@macenews.com.
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