It’s a big week for US macro data.
On Tuesday, the BLS will release a Frankenstein jobs report that’ll include a guesstimate of headline payrolls for October along with November’s establishment and household surveys.
Consensus for November’s headline NFP print is 50,000 and economists expect the jobless rate to tick higher versus September to 4.5%. We’ll never know the unemployment rate for October and I’m not sure there’s a consensus for the NFP read.
A raft of private sector indicators released in recent weeks all point to a hiring impulse that’s faint if it’s measurable at all, which is to say the US economy’s likely losing jobs on net. Last week, a Thanksgiving plunge in jobless claims reversed, pushing the initial filers series to a multi-month high.
At the press conference following the December FOMC meeting, Jerome Powell tempered an otherwise hawkish outcome by suggesting monthly payroll gains are overstated by ~60,000. If true, that’d mean the three-month average for NFP was negative in June, July and August, and just barely positive in September.
And yet, this is a sharply divided Fed which for now seems unlikely to cut rates again in January. During the same remarks to reporters last week, Powell went out of his way to say the Committee will eye incoming government data with skepticism given distortions from the shutdown.
Speaking of such distortions, the November CPI report, scheduled for Thursday, won’t include a MoM reading for the headline and core gauges, which is to say the metric that policymakers and market participants are most keen to trade won’t be published.
The BLS wasn’t able to collect CPI data for October, so there’s no way to conduct a month-to-month comparison. Consensus for the the YoY core print is 3% which, if my math’s correct, is a full percentage above 2%, the Fed’s target (with the caveat that in fact, the Fed targets PCE, not core CPI).
On Tuesday, at the same time the BLS publishes the jobs figures, the Census Bureau will finally release US retail sales data for October. Consensus expects a slight MoM gain for overall nominal spending and a stronger showing for the measure which strips out cars and gas.
Elsewhere, China released activity data for November (it painted a grim picture), the ECB will keep rates on hold (but may upgrade its outlook for the economy), the BoE may deliver its final cut of the cycle (there were four dissents in favor of a cut last month) and, most notably, the BoJ will hike rates, in line with remarks from Kazuo Ueda, who reset market expectations early this month when he tipped a move at the bank’s final 2025 policy gathering.
