February 11, 2025
By all rights, we should have seen extreme market volatility during the past several weeks. After all, we have a new President implementing many new initiatives – from back to the office for federal employees to a constant threat of tariffs toward various countries. Yet, the stock and bond markets have been relatively quiet during this implementation period. Why is that? Perhaps it is because none of this activity comes as a surprise and the markets had plenty of warnings and time to acclimate to these actions. Or perhaps they don’t see major movements within the economic world caused by these activities. Certainly, we won’t know the answer to these questions for some time — especially with recently announced delay of tariff implementation.
Last week we saw the release of the January jobs report. The increase of 143,000 jobs was slightly less than expected following a very strong month of December. The previous two months of data were revised upward by 100,000 jobs, making 2024 even stronger than originally reported. The unemployment rate moved down to 4.0% from 4.1% the previous month. In addition, wage growth increased by 0.5% monthly and 4.1% annually. Overall, this was seen as a mixed report to start the year with disappointing inflationary numbers.
We move from the focus on wage growth to the release of the January inflation data this week. The consumer and producer price indices are released tomorrow and Thursday. Because there is no meeting of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee this month, the Fed will have two months of data to consider when they meet in March. That includes two employment reports and two sets of inflation data—along with several other economic indicators. This extra time and data to consider should make the Fed decision making process interesting – especially regarding that the aforementioned Presidential initiatives would have had more time to percolate within the economy by then.
Source: Origination Pro
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