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There was a good jobs number in the US:

On Friday, the Labor Department reported that employers added 428,000 jobs in April, while average hourly earnings rose 5.5 percent from a year ago. While the report showed hiring remains resilient, economists have said that the strong job market and wage acceleration could incentivize the central bank to lift interest rates more aggressively.
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The central bank on Wednesday raised interest rates half a percentage point, the biggest increase since 2000. Speaking after the announcement, Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, cited the labor market, and in particular the record number of job openings relative to the number of unemployed workers, as a reason policymakers had become more aggressive in recent months.

“You can see that the labor market is out of balance; you can see that there is a labor shortage,” Mr. Powell said. In April, he described the labor market as “unsustainably hot.”
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The reaction to the jobs report was evident in the bond market too. The yield on 10-year Treasury notes, a proxy for investor expectations about interest rates, rose to 3.1 percent from 3 percent a day earlier.

Not so good in Canada:

Job creation in Canada slowed substantially in April and work absences due to COVID-19 spiked to near record levels, marking a subdued start to the second quarter but one that’s unlikely to divert the Bank of Canada from its quickest pace of policy tightening in decades.

The economy added 15,300 positions last month, Statistics Canada said Friday, short of the 40,000 jobs that financial analysts on Bay Street had expected. The unemployment rate fell to 5.2 per cent from 5.3 per cent, the lowest in nearly five decades of comparable data.

Hiring activity was closer to a typical month before the pandemic, following a blowout gain of roughly 409,000 positions in February and March combined as pandemic restrictions eased. It was the rare report of late that didn’t speak to sizzling growth in the Canadian economy.
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Total hours worked – a metric that economists look to for an indication of economic output – fell 1.9 per cent in April from March, partly because of a spike in illness-related absences from work, Statscan said. Nearly one in 10 employees were absent from work due to illness or disability in April, making it one of the largest months of absence during the pandemic.
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Thus far, wage growth has been slow to pick up and doesn’t come close to matching inflation, amounting to a reduction in purchasing power for the average worker. In April, average hourly wages rose 3.3 per cent on an annual basis – similar to March’s 3.4-per-cent pace, but lagging growth in 2019, when the labour market was experiencing similarly tight conditions.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 6th, 2022 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.