US NFP: Looking for a 140k gain this month - SocGen

Kit Juckes, Research Analyst at Societe Generale, suggests that away from British parochial issues, it’s jobs day in the US.

Key Quotes

“After the least volatile era in the payroll series in over 50 years, the monthly data have been winging around of late and the task now is to guess/judge where the underlying trend actually is.

Our US economics team is looking for a 140k gain this month, in line with this year’s average rather than the longer-term 204k trend. The market’s at 180k, with unemployment down to 4.8% from 4.9%, and wage growth steady at 2.6% y/y. Uncertainty about the underlying trend of growth is high enough to exaggerate the market reaction either way.

The consensus also looks for a small fall in Canadian employment, that data released at the same time as the US figures.”