The white collar crowd will grudgingly go back to the office this week across the Western world — or back to the home office — following an extended vacation not afforded to a lot of actual working people, many of whom spent Christmas re-folding the same clothes over and over again on retail sales floors and New Year’s serving drinks and food to the affluent.

In fairness, at least some regular people in America enjoy the same lengthy break as the well-to-do at Christmas, but for Main Street, the high Western holidays tend to be quite stressful, as are most things when you don’t have any money, or none to spare anyway.

Whatever your tax bracket — whether you teach kids to read for $65,000 a year or move numbers around on a screen for $650,000 — you’ll be back at it in the days ahead. Wall Street will eye the US jobs report for trading clues (read: gambling cues) in the context of a Fed which, if you believe the December SEP, is disinclined to cut rates aggressively in 2025.

Economists expect 155,000 (give or take) from the NFP readout. That’d be a downshift from the prior month’s pace, but November’s robust headline was probably a function of snapback hiring from October, when payrolls were distorted by hurricanes and work stoppages.

Ignoring any revisions, a consensus print would bring the three-month pace down to 139,000. For all of 2024, the average would be 178,000, down from 251,000 in 2023. (The final CES benchmark revision’s due with the January jobs report, which is to say next month.)

Assuming a headline at or near expectations, the Fed narrative won’t change. Over the weekend, Adriana Kugler was adamant about sticky inflation. “We’re not at 2% yet,” she told an audience at an AEA event. “Obviously our job is not done.”

No, “obviously” not, but it’s worth noting that the unemployment rate very nearly rounded to a cycle high in November, and notwithstanding the fact that 4.3% still counts as low on any historical lookback, the Fed showed itself to be hyper-sensitive to nascent labor market weakness over the summer. Economists expect an unchanged UNR on Friday.

Market pricing for Fed cuts in 2025 now stands at around 40bps. So, one cut fully priced, plus better-then-even odds of a second. That’s come in very sharply.

Jerome Powell insists the labor market’s no longer a “source of inflation.” That’s code for, “We’re going to ignore warm reads on average hourly earnings unless it’s impossible not to,” so while the market might react to an AHE overshoot this week, the Fed won’t, even as the annual rate — which exceeds 4% — is still a couple of tenths above levels generally considered to be consistent with 2% consumer price growth.

Traders will of course get all the other top- and second-tier first-of-the-month US releases this week as well, including JOLTS and ISM services on Tuesday. Job openings are seen at 7.7 million (that’d be for the last business day of November) and consensus is looking for 53.5 from ISM services. ISM manufacturing beat last week, but betrayed a familiar air of stagflation.

ADP private payrolls are seen at 130,000 on Wednesday. That session will also find the Fed releasing minutes from the December FOMC meeting. The account will be parsed for additional clarity on the extent to which the Committee’s concerned about stubborn underlying prices. An hour and a half after the jobs report on Friday, the preliminary read on University of Michigan sentiment for January will give investors a sense of the consumer mood ahead of Inauguration Day.

Elsewhere, inflation data’s due out of Europe, and China will presumably (the date can sometimes vary) release trade data and CPI figures covering December. Those updates will garner outsized attention in the context of looming tariffs and Xi Jinping’s ongoing struggle to stave off deflation. Chinese equities were off to their worst start to a calendar year since 2016.