The Nonfarm Payrolls report is likely to show a jobs addition of 200,000 to the US economy last month, down from January’s whopping 353,000 job gain. The Unemployment Rate is expected to stay unchanged at 3.7% in the reported period. A closely watched measure of wage inflation, Average Hourly Earnings, is set to rise 4.4% in the year through February, a tad slower than the 4.5% increase registered in January.
Market participants will closely scrutinize the headline NFP print and the wage inflation data to determine the timing and the scope of the Fed interest rate cut this year, especially after Fed Chair Jerome Powell delivered less hawkish comments during his testimony on the semi-annual Monetary Policy Report (MPR) before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday.
Powell said that interest rate cuts are still likely in the coming months if Fed officials are more confident that there is further evidence of falling inflation. Markets are currently pricing in about a 75% chance that the Fed could begin lowering rates in June, higher than the 63% probability seen a day earlier, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch Tool.
Previewing February’s jobs report, TD Securities (TDS) analysts said: “We look for February payrolls to show some moderation in job gains after January's meaningful upside surprise.”
“The upshot is that we are looking for mixed signals from the February data, with a report that will likely point to a still-tight labor market that's yet to act as an obstacle for a normalization in wage growth,” the TDS analysts added.
Meanwhile, the US private sector added 140,000 jobs in February, an increase from the upwardly revised 111,000 increase in January while a tad below the expected 150,000 addition, ADP reported on Wednesday. The number of job openings on the last business day of January stood at 8.86 million, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). The data also came in slightly below the market forecast of 8.9 million.
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