By coinnews 
00:00 Brian Sozzi
For more color on this report, let’s bring in Steve Sosnik, who’s the Interactive Brokers Chief Strategist, and Veronica Clark, who’s the Citi economist. Great to have you both here with us. Steve, I’m just going to turn to my left here because you’re in studio here with us. You were having bells and whistles go off on your laptop as this data crossed this morning. I want to get your initial read.
00:22 Steve Sosnik
Well, the initial read is another set of sigh of relief here for the, for the markets. I mean, you’ve got, um, you’ve got more jobs than expected, although the revision, um, sort of offset that. The revision lower, so it’s kind of a push there, but, but enough. The unemployment rate stayed stable. Um, monthly hourly earnings, average hourly earnings went down a little bit, so that sort of helps the inflation picture. Bottom line from a markets point of view is the stock market was looking, is looking right now for any excuse to rally, and it doesn’t really matter why, and as long, and they got one today. You could just, you could just feel it. The momentum is so strong. And remember, when you’re trading off a momentum, you’re basically saying I only care about price action, I don’t care about fundamentals. And so as long as the fundamentals aren’t bad enough to upset the party, you, you get, you get the kind of relief rally that we’re seeing.
01:20 Brian Sozzi
So, Veronica, how big can the party be off of this report, given the fact that it doesn’t necessarily take in the totality of potential impact from tariff policy?
01:31 Veronica Clark
Yeah, I, I think we should maybe be a little bit cautious with this one, um, because yes, this survey is taken earlier in the month in April. Um, so it’s really not going to reflect any hiring or firing decisions that are made after that April 2nd announcement. Um, and as we’re getting into May, you know, I think what we know initially is that businesses are going to pull back on hiring, and we, we have started to see signs of that. We’ve had continuing jobless claims that are rising. Um, that’s a really good signal for, you know, our people getting hired if they do get laid off. Um, we’ve had indeed.com job postings that are falling more sharply in the latter half of April. Um, so that weak hiring this time of year, this is usually when you do hire a lot of people. Um, you get new students, you know, graduating school and entering the labor force. Um, so we would expect that some of that summer data is going to start to look softer.
02:28 Brian Sozzi
Does this to you seem like a report that sets up any type of trend that the Fed would need to really signal to the market that’s expecting 100 basis points of cuts between, between now and the end of the year, that the beginning of those cuts are even in sight right now?
02:50 Veronica Clark
Yeah, I mean, there, there is so much uncertainty. Obviously, we have a Fed meeting next week. Um, I don’t think they’ll, you know, really take anything off the table, but they’re, they’re maybe going to sound like they have and, you know, indicating that they can be patient, you know, they want to see how the hard data are evolving. Um, obviously we have seen survey data that have been much weaker, but we haven’t seen that yet in the hard data. Um, but I would worry that things could just change very quickly. Um, you know, if we do start to see a more rapid increase in the unemployment rate, you know, that’s what got them to cut 50 in September. We had in one month a 0.2 percentage point increase in unemployment. If we start to see that, I think that they would, would be reactive and, and that may be by, by the June meeting.