It’s jobs week in the US. Sort of.

In the normal course of business, the BLS would be gearing up to release November payrolls on Friday. But 2025 isn’t business as usual. Of all the adjectives you might fairly employ to describe these times of ours, “normal” isn’t among them.

The official BLS jobs tally for November won’t be published until December 16, when investors will also get half of October’s missing release. Suffice to say the impact of the longest US government shutdown on record is still being felt, and the aftershocks will persist for some time.

in lieu of the government statistics, market participants continue to rely on alternative data, including and especially ADP’s weekly and monthly updates on private sector hiring.

The latest read on the high frequency series was quite weak and consensus expects a mere 20,000 from the monthly release on Wednesday. That’d be a downshift from October’s half-decent headline print.

Naively assuming no revisions, an as-expected read for November would push the three-month average up as August’s negative print rolls out of the sample.

At this point — which is to say with the market-implied odds of another rate cut at the December FOMC meeting north of 80% — there’s no ADP headline good enough to tilt the balance back in favor of the Fed’s hawks.

In other words: Wednesday’s marquee macro release in the US could show a three-sigma upside surprise and it still likely wouldn’t move the odds of a cut on December 10 back below 50%. That’s a remarkable state of affairs given that those odds were under 30% as recently as November 19.

I realize you’ve all seen the chart above more times than you care to by now, but it’s worth re-highlighting: That abrupt repricing from <30% odds to >80% odds in the space of a just a few sessions is quite the turnabout, and it coincided with a rebound off the local lows for the S&P.

Traders will also get the new Challenger report this week. Recall that the 153,074 job cut announcements Challenger counted last month were the most for any October in over two decades. Seasonal hiring plans, at just 372,520, were the fewest in the 13-year history of Challenger’s series.

In addition to the Challenger release, Thursday will also bring the newly-relevant Revelio hiring report (which showed a net 9,000-job loss for October) and jobless claims, which last week hit their lowest since April, contradicting the dour signal from virtually every other US labor market indicator.

In addition to the hiring updates, ISM’s factory and services sector PMIs are on deck. Economists are expecting another sub-50 print on the manufacturing side and a so-so 52 headline from the services readout.

On Friday, the BEA will get around to publishing personal income and spending data from September. That means the Fed will finally discover how fast (or, hopefully, not fast) price growth was during the month prior to the shutdown. Consensus is looking for 0.2% from the MoM core PCE print.

Oh, one more thing: The preliminary University of Michigan sentiment report for December’s also due Friday. November’s Michigan release, you’ll politely recall, had a solid claim on being the worst overall read on household moods in America since the survey began reporting on a monthly basis in 1978.