It’s deja vu all over again as New York stock markets reopen for trading tomorrow.
We ended 2022 waiting for the monthly jobs report from the Labor Department to tell us when slower job growth would signal the potential end to the Federal Reserve’s cycle of interest rate increases.
And we’re beginning 2023 the same way.
The Labor Department will release the jobs report for December on Friday at 8:30 a.m. New York time. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg are projecting that the economy added 200,000 jobs in the month.
That would be a strong but not too strong figure that’s unlikely to provide much clarity on the temperature of the jobs market or Federal Reserve policy. That’s especially true because the December jobs report is subject to significant seasonal error because government statisticians struggle to figure out how to adjust the data for seasonal holiday hiring.
The Friday report will be preceded this week by the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (or JOLTS report), ADP’s private payrolls data, and the Challenger Job Cuts report.
