time for a cool change
market vibes
There was a time many years ago when no one cared about CPI and Nonfarm Payroll. ISM, ADP, JOLTs and initial claims didn’t exist. There were no data releases at 8:30 AM and no one cared what the BLS said except a single page near the back of the Wall Street Journal and the Business section of the New York Times. There was occasional war news and money supply every Thursday after 4 PM. Someone might raise or lower the prime rate in Chcago. But that was it.
No one called the floors of the exchange and told us Henry Kaufman was bullish. After the fact… maybe that day or the next day the Times would write about it… maybe… because the markets didn’t need news to move. Today? They can’t move without it. Nonfarm Payroll on the first Friday of every month has been heretofore one of the most volatile days on the calendar for 16 years because the FOMC uses it to set interest rate policy. Those days are coming to an end.
On Thursday morning July 2, at 8:30 AM EDT, the Bureau of Labor Statistics delivered its latest installment of NFP employment data and the usual revisions. After reading it for over an hour this morning and asking AI to clarify its various ups and downs, this is a summary of the report (as I see it) and why I think the markets have stopped listening to over 1,000 PhD economists employed by the BLS, FOMC and the Federal Reserve.
