The US non-farm payrolls have come and gone, and on the face of it look slightly disappointing compared to expectations, although the market can't seem to make up its mind.
After an initial boost, the FTSE 100 is now around 10 points lower than immediately before the figure, up 44.02 points at 4849.77. Wall Street futures initially jumped to show a 100 point rise, then went into negative territory and are now marginally higher.
As for the figures themselves, the headline number was a loss of 125,000 jobs compared to an average expectation of a 110,000 drop as temporary census workers were laid off. However there were whispers the fall could be as high as 250,000. Within that private sector jobs rose 83,000, lower than the 112,000 concensus.
April and May headline numbers have been revised to show 25,000 more jobs were created in the two months than initially indicated. Rob Carnell at ING Bank said:
The non-farm payrolls survey did not look too different at first glance to the consensus expectations number. But dig a little deeper, and the US labour market report is not so benign. Take hours worked, for example. As a leading indicator for employment demand, there are few better. But after a couple of months of improvements, hours worked slid back to 34.1 (-0.3% month on month) this month. And the duration of unemployment keeps creeping higher. This month, it reached an average of 35.2 weeks.
So little immediate reaction from markets expected from this labour market report – but nothing to dispel the growing sense of an economy which is sliding slowly off the rails again.
