Wildfires, snow and holiday shopping. Here’s what likely influenced Friday’s jobs numbers
CNN
If the pundits proved right, the US labor market was supposed to have broken down by now.
If the pundits proved right, the US labor market was supposed to have broken down by now. It wasn’t supposed to survive the Federal Reserve’s historic and aggressive rate-hiking campaign to reel in high inflation. Instead, the job market — much like the broader US economy — has remained remarkably strong and has kept rolling right along into one of the longest periods of employment expansion in history. The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the January jobs report at 8:30 a.m. ET Friday; and, by and large, economists expect that job gains continued to slow to pre-pandemic norms but remained fairly solid (although, there’s expected to be a fair bit of data-related noise to cut through and analyze … more on that later). The consensus estimates are hovering around a net gain of 170,000 jobs for last month, according to FactSet. The unemployment rate is expected to hold steady at 4.1%. However, the solid and steady labor market appears to be approaching another junction, as well as some obstacles in the road.
US stocks rallied Friday as investors tried to stage a rebound to finish a rocky week, though all three major indexes were still on track to close the week in the red.
Gold prices reached $3,000 an ounce for the first time in history Friday, boosted by demand for safe-haven assets as investors fret about President Donald Trump’s tariffs and geopolitics.
The Trump bump in consumer sentiment is now a Trump slump.
On-again, off-again tariffs, mass government layoffs, funding cuts and immigration crackdowns have seriously spooked Wall Street, which is emphatically rejecting President Donald Trump’s chaotic economic agenda.
For craft brewers, an industry largely consisting of small businesses and where the product is made in steel plus packaged in aluminum, the newly applied tariffs are having a direct strike on their bottom lines.
President Donald Trump has said that automakers can avoid his tariffs by simply moving production to American plants. But it’s not that easy. Not by a long shot.
China has sharply criticized a proposal to sell ports in the Panama Canal to American asset management giant BlackRock, attacking the deal as “spineless groveling” and a “betrayal” of the Chinese people.
Bill Pulte, who was confirmed by the US Senate on Thursday to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency for the Trump administration, said he’s in no rush to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage behemoths that power more than half of America’s mortgages.
Tesla, the electric car company run by Elon Musk, said this week that retaliatory tariffs against US manufacturers could harm its operations and that the US should carefully consider its trade policies, a break from Musk’s ally President Donald Trump.
US stocks slid Thursday and the S&P 500 entered into correction territory, down 10% from its record high in February, as President Donald Trump threatened new tariffs on the European Union.
President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened to impose a massive tariff on European alcohol in response to the European Union’s retaliation against his steel and aluminum tariffs – a tit-for-tat escalation of a trade war that could easily get out of hand.
The Producer Price Index, a wholesale inflation gauge that is being closely watched for tariff-related impacts, showed that price hikes slowed substantially in February.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers in a Congressional hearing last January that it didn’t make sense for his platforms to verify how old their users are in order to serve them age-appropriate experiences. Instead, that responsibility should lie with app stores, he said.