Friday, January 5, 2007

Did the Jobs Report End Rate Cut Speculation?

From CBSMarketWatch:

U.S. stocks ended sharply lower on the day and mixed on the shortened three-day trading week Friday, after news of surprising strength in the labor market in December fueled concerns that the Federal Reserve won't cut interest rates anytime soon.

A downgrade of Intel Corp. and a profit-warning from Motorola Inc. weighed on the technology sector.

"The jobs number has the market scared to some extent," said Owen Fitzpatrick, head of the U.S. equity group at Deutsche Bank. "The market has been happy with weak numbers recently, as it looked forward towards a possible rate cut at the Fed's March meeting."


There has been a fair amount of speculation the Fed would lower rates fairly soon. However the jobs report indicates the economy is doing at least fairly well. More importantly, the wages information may raise concern at the Fed about inflationary pressures.

In short, this may put the idea of a rate cut off a bit longer. The question is, "will this effectively put a ceiling on the markets?"

3 comments:

JWC said...

I always find it interesting to see how the markets "react" to reports like the jobs report. I watch CNBC in the morning (I like the redhead) for entertainment value.

Have to admit I don't understand most of what is going on, and our "money" is pretty well set in a retired mode of investing (safe and careful). So we are not going to be changing anything - except for possibly moving some out of equities if stocks go up much higher, which I doubt.

Still, I worry about the future and my grandkids, especially my grandson who struggles in school and will have a hard time getting out of high school, let alone go to college.

Grandma Jo

Steve said...

I'm wondering how meaningfull the CMDEBT chart really is. It's talking about total debt, non? It goes up exponentially, but then so does population. Seems to me that it would be more useful to either have a percapita version of this chart or to add in a line illustrating population as well.

Basically if 1,000 people are $1 in debt, that's very different from 1 person being $1,000 in debt.

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