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Jobs, jobs, jobs!:

The United States produced an unexpectedly sizable batch of jobs last month, a boon for American workers that shows the labor market retains remarkable strength after three years of expansion.

Employers added 353,000 jobs in January on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and the unemployment rate remained at 3.7 percent.

The report also put an even shinier gloss on job growth for 2023, including revisions that added more than 100,000 to the figure previously tallied for December. All told, employers added 3.1 million jobs last year, more than the 2.7 million initially reported.

So bonds got hammered:

The U.S. added 353,000 jobs in January, blasting past analysts’ estimates, while wage growth unexpectedly heated up, the Labor Department reported.

The added signs of economic vigor made it more likely that the U.S. central bank will delay cutting its key policy rate until much later than many had hoped. Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday pushed back against the notion of a March rate cut.

Financial markets are pricing in a 20.5% likelihood of a 25 basis point rate cut at the Fed’s March meeting, down from 69.6% a month ago, according to CME’s FedWatch tool.
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U.S. Treasury yields surged, with the 10-year Treasury yield marking its largest one-day advance since Sept. 2022.
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The 10-year Treasury note yield was up 16.3 basis points to 4.026%, one day after reaching a new 2024 low. On the week, however, the 10-year was still down 29.7 basis points, the largest weekly decline since the week of Dec. 11.

Canadian bond yields were also sharply higher, with the closely watched five-year bond yield up 15 basis points.
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Implied interest rate probabilities in the swaps market, which capture bets for future monetary policy moves, now suggest only about a 25 per cent chance of a Bank of Canada rate cut at its April 10 meeting, down from 36 per cent prior the 0830 am ET jobs report. Earlier this week, prior to Canada releasing an unexpectedly strong gross domestic product reading, those odds were pegged at near 50-50.

A 69 per cent chance of a quarter-point interest rate cut is now priced in for the June 5 policy meeting, down from 82 per cent. The market is putting near-zero odds on a cut at the bank’s next meeting in March.

The market is still pricing in BoC cuts totaling nearly a full percentage point by year-end.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2024 at 8:14 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.