ECONOMICS

On the surface, it was an blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected. Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in January the US unexpectedly added 353K "jobs" – the most since January 2023 (when the print was 482K compared to 131K) , double the consensus forecast of 185K and more than the highest Wall Street estimate (300K from Natixis). In fact, this was a 4-sigma beat to estimate, unheard of in the past year.

The headline data was stellar across (more…)

Authored by Michael Wilkerson via The Epoch Times,

The last time the phrase “soft landing” was this popular on the internet was on the eve of the largest financial crisis the world has ever seen.

The idea behind an economic soft landing is that the central bank (for the United States, the Federal Reserve) is able to bring inflation from an overheated economy under control by increasing interest rates without producing a recession or a collapse of the financial markets. (more…)

Against a backdrop of strengthening 'hard' data, manufacturing surveys signaled a strong rebound in January.

• S&P Global's Manufacturing PMI spiked from 47.9 in Dec to 50.3 prelim to 50.7 final in January.

• ISM's Manufacturing PMI jumped from 47.1 (revised lower) in Dec to 49.1 in January, well above the 47.2 expected.

Source: Bloomberg

The jump in the S&P Global print, to its highest since September 2022, is the biggest since at (more…)