- Wall Street gets a seldom-seen occurrence in economic data this week, with the Department of Labor reporting its March jobs report on Friday, but with the stock market closed.
- Good Friday is a market holiday but not a federal holiday, but it's rare that the big payrolls figure, released on the first Friday of the month, lands on that day.
- Ahead of the number: Weekly initial jobless claims will be released at 8:30 AM ET today, with economists looking for a slight dip to 680K from 684K the week before. Continuing claims are forecast to drop to 3.775M. It's those continuing claims, which demonstrate the trend in the labor market, that will have more bearing on tomorrow's payrolls report, where the survey comes in the first half of the Month.
- Private jobs bounce: Yesterday ADP reported its measure of private-sector employment, which showed a rise of 517K, about inline with estimates. The service sector added 437K jobs and "significantly outpaced its monthly average," ADP said, while the manufacturing sector added 80K jobs. The ADP report tends to have a bad correlation with the official government figures, though, and Wall Street is looking for a bigger gains tomorrow.
- 1 million jobs added?: The consensus is for nonfarm payrolls to have risen by 647K last month, which would be the biggest gain since September 2020. The unemployment rate is seen falling to 6% from 6.2%. But there's some big variation in what the big banks are calling for.
- "We look for nonfarm payrolls to increase by 1 million in March, pushing the unemployment rate down to 5.9%," Merrill Lynch says.
- Morgan Stanley is looking for a net payrolls gain of 700K, but also predicts that the jobless rate will fall to 5.9%. JPMorgan Chase is close to the average prediction at 650K.
- Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton, is also predicting a bullish gain of 1M jobs, which would be the highest since last August when the summer rebound was still strong.
- "Private sector payrolls are expected to rise by 850,000 while gains mostly at the state and local levels make up the remaining 150,000 of those increases," Swonk writes in a blog. "Employment gains in restaurants, bars and accommodation are expected to account for more than half of overall job gains. Hiring in health care is also expected to post outsize gains."
- "In fact, one of the ironies of the pandemic was the blow to health care employment," she adds. "We were still down more than a half million jobs in the health care sector in February compared to the year prior. Cuts at the onset of the crisis were particularly large because smaller offices were forced to close for lockdowns almost entirely. Hospitals were forced to put more profitable elective surgeries on hold as people with non-COVID conditions shied away."
- “We still expect nonfarm payrolls to show an above-consensus 700,000 gain, with a lot of that gain reflecting the rebound in leisure and hospitality employment,” Michael Pearce, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics, told Reuters.