Mixed Reaction to Mixed Jobs Report

Today's jobs report has proven to be one of the most extreme examples of competing narratives in the past year or so.  The headline number wasn't too extreme compared to the forecast, but at 275k vs 200k, certainly the sort of thing that would hurt rates.  Revisions told a completely different story with last month falling to 229k from 353k.  The unemployment rate (3.9 vs 3.7) and wages (0.1 vs 0.3) added to the confusion. Bonds agreed with the morning's trading having been very "2-way" so far.

If anything, this places even more emphasis on next week's CPI to cast a deciding vote on whether rates should continue rallying into the following week's Fed announcement, or if the last week and a half of improvement is a sufficient correction to the early-2024 rate spike.  Either way, be sure to note that the pace of the rally over the past week and a half is decelerating noticeably.