The US Bureau of Labor Statistics will release May’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) on Friday. Analysts expect job openings to come in at 7.86 million from just over 8 million in April. Jefferies senior US economist Thomas Simon joins Morning Brief to discuss the state of the labor market as Wall Street eyes the Federal Reserve’s first interest rate cut.
Simon explains that while current labor market data shows the economy is cooling, he prefers to view it as “chilling”: “It’s more like we’re gradually starting to see conditions normalize in a way that didn’t seem possible without more widespread damage. And I think that rather than litigate the strength of the economy and try to find reasons why it’s not going to be sustained, it’s probably better to just kind of take the information at face value — to the extent that economic data has any sort of accurate value anyway — and just sort of go with it because that’s clearly what the Fed is doing right now.”
As the Fed stresses its data dependence, Simon explains the approach as “this idea that you want to keep your options open. You want to make sure that financial conditions don’t trend so far away from this kind of 50-50 stance that the market ends up kind of getting to the point where it sort of backs the Fed into a corner.” He believes that for a rate cut in September, there needs to be more data showing we’re getting closer to the 2% target for inflation or data showing the labor market is cooling faster. He adds that the election will also be a factor that will weigh on the Fed’s decision to initiate a rate cut in September.
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