Stocks continued to rise yesterday on moderate volume as people got ready to out for the long weekend on strength of a better-than-expected Labor Department report indicating 67k jobs added by private employers in August, 39% above the Thomson Reuters projected data.
Chief economist at the Credit Union National Association, Bill Hampel, cited the 100k jobs figure as a comfortable floor however, projecting that it should even be over 150k to “feel confident we have a nice, sustainable recovery”.
Institute for Supply Management data on the services sector indicated slowing growth on average expansion, disappointing expectations and reinforcing concerns about overall market viability and sector balance.
With bad news hampering August market performance, the last three days have shown promising indicators, starting with Wednesday’s manufacturing data breaking the historical down trend in September.
Other indicators, like the revised data on June/July (indicating more jobs were added than previously reported), as well as a larger-than-expected rise in hourly wages last month and in temporary worker hiring (which is sometimes taken as an indicator of employer’s propensity to hire), also point higher.
As some 0.5M Americans hit the pavement looking for work in August, driving the unemployment rate up 0.1%, there are some who see this as a positive indicator that the employment sector is adjusting to prevailing conditions.
Bond prices dropped off after the report driving up interest rates, with the yield on a 10-year Treasury note up 0.09% (a statistic often used to peg rates on mortgages/consumer loans).
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