In addition to Jerome Powell’s congressional testimony, traders will be treated this week to a bevy of top-tier data including a jobs report out of the US.

I doubt anyone needs a reminder, but the last jobs report was a bombshell. The headline print doubled consensus and annual revisions pushed total hiring in 2023 beyond the three million mark. Not only that, average hourly earnings printed a scorching 0.6% MoM gain, double the expected pace, and the hottest in two years.

When considered with warm reads on both CPI and PCE prices for January, the balance of macro evidence argues strongly against “early” rate cuts, notwithstanding last week’s underwhelming ISM headline and Michigan sentiment revision.

Economists expect 200,000 from the February NFP print. That’d push the three-month moving average up to 295,000, the highest in 11 months.

I’m decidedly in the “more jobs is always better” camp, but… well, I don’t know. If the macro models mean anything at all (and they may not), it’s hard to understand how the figure above can be consistent with running the last mile of the inflation fight if you’re the Fed.

The unemployment rate’s seen at 3.7% and the monthly pace of wage gains is expected to moderate to 0.2%. If there’s another hot AHE read, particularly in the presence of another NFP overshoot, markets might start to question whether the dot plot refresh later this month will find the median 2024 marker shifting to reflect just two cuts this year instead of three. Let me quickly say, though, that the jobs report could show a “hangover” given how hot the last report was.

JOLTS, due Wednesday, will be eyed closely as usual. Consensus there is 8.89 million job openings on the last business day of January. That’d be 136,000 fewer than the prior month, but between the likelihood of a headline “surprise” in one direction or the other and revisions, that math’s irrelevant.

As a reminder: Stocks don’t typically keep climbing in the presence of fewer job openings. The disparity illustrated above is another way of visualizing the anomalous nature of the post-pandemic macro-market-policy nexus.

Also on Wednesday, ADP will deliver an update on private sector hiring. For what it’s worth (which isn’t a lot when it comes to predicting NFP) consensus expects 150,000 from the ADP headline.

In the wake of the ISM manufacturing miss last week, markets will be interested to see if the services gauge likewise decelerated. In light of the PCE “supercore” overshoot, traders will focus intently on the prices gauge. Recall that January’s ISM services release came with a disconcerting overshoot. Plainly, that’s bad news for a Fed trying to curb services-sector price pressures. So, any relief on that front from data due Tuesday would be welcome. Economists are looking for 53 from the ISM services headline.

Also on deck in the new week: The March ECB meeting and the National People’s Congress in China, where Xi Jinping and his army of functionaries will pick a growth target amid a protracted economic quagmire.

Obviously, markets want stimulus from China. Fiscal stimulus, ideally. The Party won’t deliver. It’ll be more of the same: Promises, rhetoric and piecemeal measures. Local stocks are trying to avoid a fourth annual loss.

Heavy-handed government intervention stopped an early-year rout (the mainland benchmark’s up 12% from the lows), but sentiment’s poor and there’s scant evidence to suggest Xi’s “Thought” (a proper noun, you’re reminded) will turn up any good ideas anytime soon.

Authorities in Beijing will probably continue to support local equities, but CPI and PPI figures will surely show the world’s second-largest economy still struggling with deflation. No amount of statistical magic from the NBS can obscure that.

The January-February trade rollup from China’s due soon as well. As usual, it’ll be maddeningly difficult to parse.