By Investing.com — The latest US nonfarm payrolls report on Friday is due to highlight the economic calendar this week.
Economists expect the US economy to add 144,000 jobs in September, up slightly from 142,000 in the prior month. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, is seen matching August’s level of 4.2%.
In August, payrolls rose from a heavily-downwardly revised reading of 89,000 and were below forecasts of 164,000, while the jobless rate ticked down from 4.3%. As a whole, the numbers indicated a downshift in labor demand — a trend identified by several Federal Reserve officials as a key driving force behind their decision to announce a jumbo 50-basis point interest rate reduction last month.
Analysts at ING argued in a note to clients that the jobs market continues to hold “the key to the pace” of upcoming potential interest rate cuts, particularly as inflation — once the major focus of a series of aggressive Fed borrowing cost hikes — shows signs of abating.
“If we get the unemployment rate rising back to 4.3% next Friday and a sub 75,000 payrolls print expect the calls for a second 50 [basis point] rate cut to grow markedly,” the ING analysts said.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell signaled on Monday that the central bank would likely opt for more traditional quarter-point interest rate cuts moving forward, but stressed that the future path of borrowing costs is not on a preset course.
Powell added that the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee is not “in a hurry to cut rates quickly” despite announcing the outsized drawdown at its Sept. 17-18 gathering. He defended the decision, saying it reflected the FOMC’s “growing confidence that, with an appropriate recalibration of our policy stance, strength in the labor market can be maintained in a context of moderate economic growth and inflation moving sustainably down to 2%.”
On Tuesday, US job openings unexpectedly increased slightly in August, potentially indicating some resilience in cooling labor demand in the third quarter.
The closely-monitored Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey showed that available positions, a proxy for labor demand, rose to 8.040 million on the final business day of August, climbing from an upwardly-revised tally of 7.711 million in July. Economists had predicted the so-called JOLTS report would dip marginally to 7.640 million.
In July, the figure slipped to its lowest mark in three-and-a-half years, which was seen as a possible sign that the US jobs market was losing steam — albeit in an orderly fashion.
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