Last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell indicated during his speech at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium that the central bank would be paying close attention to the labor market when determining its monteary policy.
As a result, investors will likely be scrutinizing any coming employment data in order to determine the scope of the Fed’s indicated interest-rate cuts.
However, Brian Rose, senior U.S. economist at UBS, has urged caution to investors examining weekly jobless claims.
“Markets have started to focus more on weekly jobless claims. There is a lot of noise in this data and it is notoriously difficult to make the right seasonal adjustments,” he wrote in a note.
He added that while weekly jobless claims can provide early detection for a rise in layoffs, unemployment remains at historically low levels. And even if the labor market is cooling, that would be after the notably hot job market that arose after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Claims appear to be on a rising trend, but we could have said the same a year ago, and like the unemployment rate, the level of claims is still low from a historical perspective,” Rose wrote. “The jury is still out, in our view, and we caution against overreacting to any one week’s worth of data.”
