U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman delivered an entirely predictable press conference yesterday as he kept interest rates on hold at the 4.25% level and said he would await for more data before considering a possible move downward.
Markets liked it: Europe and Asia are broadly up this morning with the exception of China, where stocks fell on news of an unexpected deterioration in manufacturing. More importantly, S&P 500 futures are up nearly a full percentage point, premarket.
But there was one theme that Powell kept returning to which isn’t so positive: “Downside risks” to the labor market. Powell referenced this phrase no fewer than six times in his press conference.
“We do see downside risk in the labor market,” he told reporters. “The labor market looks solid. Inflation is above target. And even if you – if you look through the tariff effects, we think it’s still a bit above target. And that’s why our stance is where it is. But, as I mentioned, you know, downside risks to the labor market are certainly apparent.”
That’s actually a pretty good summation of what economists are seeing in the employment data right now. There is close to full employment, but the hiring market is sluggish and some of the good headline numbers are masked by one-off moves in government and education hiring.
Some analysts see U.S. employment getting weaker, not stronger, in the coming months.
“Chair Powell’s reading of the economic data was similar to ours—he highlighted the softer growth pace in the first half of the year, noted that the labor market remains solid but said six times that it faces ‘downside risks,’ and said that inflation is most of the way back to 2% and that a ‘reasonable base case’ is that tariffs will have only a one-time impact on the price level. Taken together, this suggests that lowering rates soon could be reasonable but is not yet essential,” Goldman Sachs’ Jan Hatzius and his team told clients in a note this morning.
Lawrence Werther and Brendan Stuart at Daiwa Capital Markets noticed the same thing: “We found it interesting that he returned several times to the idea that officials are attentive to risks to the employment side of the dual mandate. He noted that unemployment remained low and that deceleration in hiring and growth of labor force participation suggest that the labor market is in balance, but we did read his comments as pointing to increased concern versus previous statements.”
The jobs number (nonfarm payrolls, to give its technical name) is due out tomorrow. Expect stocks to react strongly if it comes in weak.
“Our forecast is for job growth to weaken in July and for the unemployment rate to tick higher. This will probably increase Federal Reserve concerns about the risks to the labor market, potentially throwing more support behind an earlier rate cut than is in our baseline,” Oxford Economics’ Nancy Vanden Houten told clients.
UBS’s Paul Donovan has a typically pithy observation on why it might be that U.S. companies are moving factories back to America but not actually creating jobs: The new factories are full of robots, not humans: “Several advanced economies, including the US and the UK, have experienced a boom in factory building in recent years. Increasing the size of factory buildings implies more manufacturing activity is taking place inside those buildings. [But] manufacturing employment is not increasing—this investment appears to represent capital for labor substitution,” he said.
Here’s a snapshot of the action prior to the opening bell in New York:
- S&P 500 futures were up 1% this morning, premarket, after the index closed down 0.12% yesterday.
- STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.14% in early trading.
- The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.52% in early trading.
- Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 1.02%.
- China’s CSI 300 Index was down 1.82%.
- The South Korea KOSPI was down 0.28%.
- India’s Nifty 50 was up 0.08%.
- Bitcoin is still above $118K.
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