“I mean, are you kidding me with this week’s event risk?” Nomura’s Charlie McElligott exclaimed, looking ahead to what’ll be a very busy stretch for traders.

To call this week’s docket crowded would be an understatement, and not a small one either. Every day, there are “binary catalysts for rates and risk assets” (as Charlie put it), starting with the Treasury financing estimate on Monday.

It’s fair to suggest the Treasury refunding announcement is actually the most important scheduled “macro” update, but the calendar is full of marquee releases including, obviously, the January jobs report.

Consensus expects 175,000 from the headline. Amusingly, that’s the same as consensus headed into December payrolls, which came in well ahead of forecasts.

Recall that December’s report was very messy. Although the headline print was a beat, participation dropped and the household survey showed a large decline. Nevertheless, jobless claims are subdued and given the resilience of the American consumer and every indication that demand remains, if anything, too strong for the Fed’s liking, it’s hard to see the bottom falling out for the labor market imminently.

The market will already have Jerome Powell’s press conference remarks by the time the jobs report is released (those interested can peruse my FOMC preview here), and assuming the headline doesn’t print — I don’t know — sub-100,000 and/or the unemployment rate doesn’t abruptly spike several tenths, the release probably won’t be pivotal for the policy narrative.

JOLTS on Tuesday is expected to show job openings across the US economy were 8.79 million on the final business day of December. That’d effectively be unchanged from the prior report, which saw the quit rate recede to 2.2%, the lowest since September of 2020. Total quits were the fewest since February of 2021 in November. Any additional moderation would point in the direction of even less churn, and thereby less competition-driven wage pressure. There’s still plenty of room for the JOLTS headline (i.e., vacancies) to “absorb” labor market normalization such that actual job losses remain limited.

Crucially, the Fed will get an update on one of their favorite labor cost measures Wednesday, when quarterly ECI figures are released. Consensus expects a 1% gain for the third consecutive quarter.

As the familiar annotation on the chart reminds you, it was ECI which prompted Powell’s original hawkish pivot in late 2021.

The headline ECI prints are still a little “too” elevated, but like a lot of other key policy inputs, the Fed’s probably ok with it as long as they (the data points) don’t re-accelerate meaningfully. I don’t see that happening here, although I would note that if enough variables stay elevated, the cumulative effect is almost surely a higher neutral rate, to the extent r-star is a concept worth considering.

On Thursday, along with jobless claims, markets will get an estimate of productivity and unit labor costs for last quarter in the US. Like ECI (although to a lesser extent) those figures are meaningful for policymakers. And that release will get a mention, both in these pages and elsewhere.

ISM manufacturing for January is also on the calendar this week. Consensus is looking for 47. That’d mark a 15th straight month in contraction territory.

Do note: S&P Global’s factory gauge for the US economy moved back into expansion in the flash reading for this month.

That’s hardly the end of it. Also on deck: Conference Board confidence, updates on the national home price gauges in the US, eurozone GDP, euro-area inflation and the Bank of England.

This’ll all play out as a meaningful share of US market cap reports earnings, with releases scheduled from America’s mega-cap titans including Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Apple.