Wall Street’s dreams for a bulletproof economy impervious to President Donald Trump’s trade war may have been shattered, but market veteran Ed Yardeni accentuated the positive in what was an otherwise dismal jobs report.
That’s as payrolls grew by just 73,000 last month, well below forecasts for about 100,000. Meanwhile, May’s tally was revised down from 144,000 to 19,000, and June’s total was slashed from 147,000 to just 14,000, meaning the average gain over the past three months is now only 35,000.
While Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, acknowledged in a note Monday the report was a shocker, he maintained the labor market remains resilient.
“It’s hard to put a positive spin on this news, but not for us!” he wrote.
Yardeni pointed to solid increases in aggregate hours worked and the average workweek in the private sector. In addition, private-industry wages also saw healthy advances and hit record highs.
Meanwhile, he attributed some of the slowdown in payroll gains to the shrinking supply of workers instead of waning demand for workers.
The labor force has stopped growing in recent months amid Trump’s immigration crackdown. At the same time, gauges for labor demand have very closely tracked this supply trend so far this year, which is an unusual phenomenon, Yardeni explained.
“This implies that the weak gains in payrolls in recent months might have something to do with the supply of labor,” he added. “The demand for labor might have been temporarily weakened by employers’ holding off on hiring until Trump’s Tariff Turmoil.”
By contrast, JPMorgan economists interpreted the jobs data as an indication of weaker demand for workers.
In a note on Friday evening, they downplayed the increases in wages and average workweeks, while pointing out that hiring in the private sector has slowed to an average of just 52,000 in the last three months, with sectors outside health and education stagnating.
“We have consistently emphasized that a slide in labor demand of this magnitude is a recession warning signal,” JPMorgan added. “Firms normally maintain hiring gains through growth downshifts they perceive as transitory. In episodes when labor demand slides with a growth downshift, it is often a precursor to retrenchment.”
The note also warned the depressed job-growth pace is unlikely to sustain income gains.
Bank of America said in its own note Monday a shock to labor demand should lead to a slowdown in wage growth and hours worked. That didn’t happen. While it’s not clear demand is deteriorating faster than supply, BofA said the jobs data looks more like a supply than a demand shock so far.
For now, even though hiring has cooled sharply, there’s no sign of mass layoffs yet, and the unemployment rate has barely changed, bouncing in a tight range between 4% and 4.2% for more than a year.
The economy is still seen as holding up. The Atlanta Fed’s GDP tracker points to continued growth, though it’s expected to decelerate to 2.1% in the third quarter from 3% in the second quarter.
The supply-versus-demand question could be key in how the Federal Reserve responds, or not, to the jobs data. Given Monday’s big rally in the stock market and continued drop in Treasury yields, Wall Street is betting on Fed rate cuts soon.
JPMorgan said job creation is no longer solid, and that when combined with growing headwinds from Trump’s trade war, the recent data point to the Fed moving closer to lowering rates.
Meanwhile, BofA backed its forecast that the Fed won’t lower rates this year, and Yardeni similarly reaffirmed his view of a “none-and-done” scenario.
“That’s because we expect that the next batch of inflation indicators will show that tariffs are boosting consumer price inflation, especially of durable goods,” he added. “We also expect to see more signs of life in the labor market.”
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