Daily Brief - ☀️ Is the US job market booming?

TLDR: To say Friday is a big market day is an understatement. There is a lot riding on the jobs report that will hit the tapes at 8.30 am EST. January US jobs report, hot enough to scald a lizard, upended markets and expectations of just how far the Federal Reserve would have to go to cool the economy. So is the labor market really booming?

The report is expected to show that the US added 215,000 jobs in February, a big step down from the 517,000 added in January. The stakes are high for the Fed. Last month, the Central Bank slowed the pace of its monetary tightening to a 25 bps hike after a series of 75 and 50 bps raises last year.

Although unlikely to impact the decision to hike 25 bps in March - Feds hate to move the increments up in a zig-zag fashion for fear of seeming not-in-the-know - the jobs report will definitely drive market perception of how many more hikes come after that one.

If the data show that the re-acceleration at the start of the year was short-lived, the Fed’s more dovish narrative will become much easier. In fairness, a similar (even larger) jump in jobs happened last July before the job pace resumed its downward trend.

If the data is once again stronger - payrolls, or wage growth - that story will come under fire.

This is the balancing act Chairman Powell will have to perform on Tuesday and Wednesday when he testifies before Congress on monetary policy, unable to know what Friday might bring. Normally, this testimony is as dry as it gets in the world of live TV but this time markets are likely to hang on every word.

As far as Mr Powell, a little bad news on Friday would be good news.

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If you have not heard yet, Twitter was down Monday morning.

“Clicking on links would no longer open them; instead, users would see a mysterious error message reporting that “your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.” Images stopped loading as well. Other users reported that they could not access TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned client for professional users.“, we quote from the Verge.

Apparently, that was the result of the mass firings that swept the company since Musk’s takeover.

A single engineer was staffed on a major API service which interconnected to several other functionalities in the app - leading to a major crash.

Read more here.