The Paris exchange took off again to attack 7,500 points this Wednesday and successfully. By midday, the Cac 40 erased its losses from the previous day, rising 0.3% to 7,508 points. On Wall Street, futures contracts are stable. Investors have an important meeting on their agenda at 4:00 p.m.: the review of employment statistics in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, attached to the Department of Labor, will publish the revision of payroll growth over the year to March 2024. A revision that promises to be potentially massive… and downward.
According to estimates from Goldman Sachs, the number of job creations could be lowered from 600,000 to 1 million positions, which would mean that the labor market has been deteriorating for longer than we think. Preliminary numbers should always be taken with a grain of salt (final data will be revealed next February), but an adjustment above 501,000 would be the largest in 15 years. Less alarmingly, the JPMorgan Chase & Co bank expects a reduction of only about 360,000 jobs. Currently, official data shows that the economy created 2.9 million jobs from April 2023 to March 2024, a monthly average of 242,000.
Pigeons go berserk in the event of a major overhaul
Market sentiment has recovered from the panic of a recession, but is still fragile in mid-August. As inflation gradually ceases to be a concern for central banks, financial markets are increasingly sensitive to economic fears, and a major downward revision in US hiring could cause volatility to pick up again. A primer on what happened with the jobs report in July. ” The bigger the downgrade, the bigger the fear that the Fed waited too long before normalizing its policy, the crazier the doves will get and the bigger the pressure will be on the dollar. », analyzes Ipek Ozkardeskaya, from Swissquote Bank. Either way, these revised figures do not cover hiring since April, but it is the latest data that really matters for the Federal Reserve and the pace of future rate cuts, Deutsche Bank points out. It is therefore not certain that it affects Jerome Powell’s speech on Friday at the Jackson Hole economic symposium. The most powerful central banker is expected to open the door to an interest rate cut in September.
To follow in the evening, exactly at 20.00, the publication of the minutes from the July meeting of the Fed. On the business side, American distributors will lead the way. Giants Macy’s and Target will be involved in the quarterly earnings exercise, the second in this case.