Hard as it’ll be to focus on macroeconomic data amid the fallout from the weekend assassination of Ali Khamenei, it’s jobs week in America. The show must go on, as they say.

Economists expect to hear the world’s largest economy added around 60,000 positions on net in February, a decent encore from January’s surprisingly robust readout.

Recall that the BLS’s tally showed a 130,000 gain for the first month of 2026, a result some viewed with suspicion in light of conflicting signals from alternative measures of the US hiring impulse.

A consensus NFP headline would push the three-month average to the brink of 80,000, the highest in over a year.

I should include a one-sentence recap of the revisions which accompanied the January release: Jobs growth in 2025 suffered a veritable collapse from the prior year, as tariff angst stoked uncertainty both among consumers and employers.

The narrative now says that after 2025’s slowdown, US hiring’s poised to recover, despite the persistence of trade uncertainty and generalized angst around the Trump administration’s domestic and foreign policy agenda. Fingers crossed, I suppose.

Ahead of BLS payrolls, investors will get ADP private hiring, Revelio’s makeshift national hiring report and an update on Challenger job cuts. All of those readouts were foreboding in January, making for a stark contrast with the rosy government figures.

“The question is whether investors will put as much confidence in the private data as had previously been the case given the strong divergence between the official BLS payrolls series and private providers for January’s data,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen remarked. “[D]espite the softening on the private side for January, headline NFP doubled the consensus, leaving investors with more questions than answers.”

I’d gently suggest market participants would do well to retain some of the skepticism they harbored in 2025 vis-à-vis the BLS figures. Nothing’s “fixed” at the bureau. In fact, there’s every reason to believe it’s all still broken. The idea that the mere act of publishing numbers on time is sufficient to restore lost credibility is — and I’ll be polite — a little silly.

Americans remained very concerned about their jobs, and that’s dragging consumer sentiment. Pervasive worries around the impact of AI on white collar hiring don’t help.

As the figure above reminds you, the US is experiencing a “jobless boom.” A lackluster advance read on GDP for Q4 suggests the “boom” bit might be overstated, with the caveat that most of the drag on headline growth came from the government shutdown.

In addition to the labor market data, this week features both ISM surveys for February (manufacturing’s seen at 51.6, which would mark a second month in expansion territory, and services at a decent 53.5), as well as the preliminary read on productivity and unit labor costs for Q4.

Don’t sleep on that latter release. Unit labor costs are top of mind right now given macro watchers’ obsession with AI’s potential to drive a productivity renaissance, the dark, flip side of which could be a human capital apocalypse.

Also on deck in the US: Belated retail sales figures for January. Consensus expects a second straight underwhelming read on nominal spending.

“Typically, we’d [argue] that the marquee jobs data would far outweigh the update on nominal spending [but] the risk of a consumer pullback amid mounting macro uncertainties shouldn’t be dismissed,” BMO’s Lyngen went on. “Especially in the event that the divergence between softer private and resilient official labor data persists.”