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US stocks rallied all day Friday in spite of the worst monthly jobs report on record.
The market has brushed off bleak labor market data, including the staggeringly high weekly jobless claims, over the past weeks. Friday was no exception.
The April report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the US economy lost 20.5 million jobs, bringing the unemployment rate to 14.7%. It was the worst monthly report in history, in terms of both jobs lost and the unemployment rate.
The recent stock market rebound has been fast and furious. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is now up for the year. And at only 8% below its all-time high, the Nasdaq is out of both bear market and correction status. (A bear market is 20% from a peak while a correction is a more than 10% drop.)
The S&P 500 is no longer in a bear market either. It’s 14% from its record high. And one market strategist has a bold prediction. Brett Ewing, chief market strategist at First Franklin Financial Services, says the blue chip index will continue rallying and hit a new all-time high of 3,500 before the presidential election. The S&P 500 peaked at just under 3,400 on February 19.
Ewing is bullish because he thinks that the number of people filing for jobless claims every week has peaked and that investors will continue to flock to the big tech stocks like Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Google owner Alphabet (GOOGL) and Facebook (FB) that dominate the S&P 500.
Other experts are growing increasingly optimistic too. Matt Toms, chief investment officer of of fixed income at Voya Investment Management, said aggressive actions by the Federal Reserve to try and help consumers, businesses and even cities deal with the Covid-19 pandemic will help turn the market and economy around more quickly than skeptics think.
American paychecks just got a whole lot bigger. That’s not the great news you’d expect it to be.
Hourly wages were up 4.7% from March to April, significantly higher than the 0.3% average monthly increase from the previous 12 months.
Paychecks grew by nearly 8% from a year ago, way more than the average 3.5% yearly increase Americans have been getting over the past year.
Paycheck growth was a strange quirk in the jobs report: More high-income earners stayed in their jobs than low-income workers, skewing the wage data higher.
The pandemic devastated the American jobs landscape in April, according to federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday.
Most major industries shed millions of positions, and unemployment rates skyrocketed to record levels among most major worker groups.
Here are some statistics:
Main Street is reeling from the coronavirus crisis. Wall Street is looking forward to better days ahead.
US stocks opened sharply higher Friday even after the American jobs market lost a record 20.5 million jobs.
Markets barely flinched after the Labor Department said the United States lost 20.5 million jobs during April because of the self-imposed shutdown to fight the pandemic.
The unemployment rate spiked to 14.7%, blowing past the worst levels of the Great Recession.
But Wall Street was hardly shocked by the numbers. Economists had predicted an even bigger loss of jobs and a 16% unemployment rate.
“Investors were already braced for a very dismal employment report,” said Keith Lerner, chief market strategist at SunTrust.
The reaction on Wall Street is another reminder that the stock market is not the economy. Investors look six to nine months into the future.
Moreover, the S&P 500 represents the biggest companies, many of which have the resources to ride out this storm.
America lost 20.5 million jobs in April as the coronavirus crisis devastated the country’s labor market, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday. It was the largest single month of job losses since the BLS began tracking the data in 1939.
The unemployment rate rose to 14.7%, the highest on record since the BLS began its monthly series in 1948.
American drivers, some of whom are hurting financially from mass unemployment, may not be happy to see that prices at the pump are no longer imploding.
The national average for a gallon of gas is now at $1.81, according to AAA. While that’s well below $2.89 a gallon from a year ago, it’s also off the low of $1.77.
During the height of the crisis, more than a dozen US states had at least one gas station with sub-$1-a-gallon gasoline, according to GasBuddy. Now just two stations in the nation are sitting below $1 a gallon, both in Arkansas.
“Ultra-low prices have disappeared,” said Patrick DeHaan, oil and refined products analyst at GasBuddy.
These trends, along with record supply cuts by OPEC and Russia, have allowed some cautious optimism to creep back into an oil market that was filled with gloom and doom for much of this year.
Uber (UBER) shares climbed 8% higher in premarket trading despite reporting a $2.9 billion loss in the first three months of this year.
In the company’s earnings report late Thursday, Uber also said it posted revenue of $3.5 billion in the first three months of the year, a 14% increase from a year earlier.
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the Rides business was down about 80% in the month of April, although it has been picking up in recent weeks.
The impact of pandemic on its Eats business, Khosrowshahi said, has been a silver lining. “The big opportunity that we thought Eats was just got bigger,” Khosrowshahi said on an earnings call.
US stock futures are moving higher ahead of this morning’s jobs report, which is expected to be the worst monthly report on record.
Stocks ended higher on Thursday, buoyed by investor optimism over the reopening of the US economy. The Nasdaq managed to turn green on the year and is up 0.1% for the year.
Millions of Americans who are out of work won’t need statistics to confirm what they already know: Their livelihoods have been hard hit by mass business closures during the coronavirus pandemic.
But the government’s official jobs report, set to be released this morning, will give one of the most comprehensive overviews of that economic fallout.
By all accounts, it’s expected to be a chilling report, showing layoffs surged and unemployment rose to Great Depression levels in April.
The report, which will be released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at 8:30 am ET, will inform policymakers as they continue to respond to the crisis, and it will document how severely stay-at-home orders have hurt American workers.
Economists polled by Refinitiv expect the US economy shed 21.85 million jobs in April, by far the largest number on record. The US government’s monthly jobs data dates back to 1939.
No end is in sight for coronavirus-related job losses.
The pandemic has ravaged the US labor market, and 1 in 5 American workers have filed for first-time unemployment benefits since mid-March, when lockdown measures took effect across the country.
Another 3.2 million Americans filed initial jobless claims last week, after factoring in seasonal adjustments, the Department of Labor reported Thursday.
Without those adjustments — which economists use to account for seasonal hiring fluctuations — the raw number was 2.8 million.
During the last two weeks of every month, about 350 contractors sit in cubicles in government call centers in Atlanta, Dallas, Kansas City and Fort Walton Beach, Florida, phoning companies with a list of questions about their latest payroll numbers. It’s not a glamorous job, but it’s an important one.
The data they collect, which they feed into a computer software program, is part of what later becomes the official jobs report released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics every month. One of the most important economic indicators, especially in a crisis, it’s guarded securely and when released, its findings can move the stock market.
Its data informs the White House, Congress and the Federal Reserve as they make policy. And it will be written into the history books for years to come.
But in March and April, the data collectors couldn’t go into work. Read more here.
