By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
I want to get your read in on not just the report but what it signals for investors who are pretty much cheering everything or anything that they can at this point as Steve Sosnick from Interactive Brokers had told us during our special report.
00:18 Steve Sosnick
Sure. Yeah, thanks for having me in. I think that this report and the market reaction shows that people are kind of grasping for straws in a way as far as looking for signs of hope. It does walk that fine line between hope and despair, where the headline number 177,000, better than expected, we did get those back month revisions. One of the things that I maybe point out the cloud behind the silver lining, which is kind of my job as an economist, is that some of the job gains there were in retail and then also trade and warehousing, which could be due to the front loading of purchases by consumers and businesses to get in front of the tariffs, because this is the data for April. We do know that there was the pause put in, and this could be almost like people making that last dash to get the goods while the getting is still good. So, uh my big concern is that this could be the peak for the jobs number for at least the next few months.
02:13 Speaker B
Yeah, and I’m curious what happens to all of those workers when obviously imports are down. Uh we’re speaking with the head of the port of LA later, who’s going to talk to us about how much there’s has been a decrease in those imports to Los Angeles. I also wonder how you’re thinking about the fall off in job listings to sites like Indeed. To what extent do you see that becoming an increase in unemployment moving forward, both in terms of labor market weakness when it comes to job postings and some of those sector specific jobs we talked about.
03:01 Steve Sosnick
Yeah, and that’s a really legitimate concern here, especially since coming out of COVID, we know that one of the themes out of corporate America was this job hoarding where they wouldn’t let people go. They may be over posted in terms of the jobs, hired more than perhaps what they wanted to because they realized how difficult it was to find the talent that they needed when in in that tight job market. Well, if the job market loosens a little bit, they’re going to be less keen on actually replacing some of those employees. I think that we’re actually getting a slightly early read on that type of dynamic in today’s report, where it showed that the average work week in manufacturing ticked down about 0.2 hours. That’s one of the few components of the jobs report that constitutes a forward indicator, so a leading economic indicator as opposed to concurrent or backward looking. And so that’s something to really pay close attention to. It might be people at when transportation and warehousing at the ports where we see some of the hours being cut as opposed to jobs being cut, but they’re already beginning to cut the hours in manufacturing.