Sometimes bad news is good news. That’s the upside-down logic of modern markets, and it was on full display Wednesday morning when US stocks opened higher after a June jobs report that, by most measures, was pretty underwhelming.
The Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq all climbed at the open on July 2, with equity futures rising roughly 0.5% across the board. Dow futures hit a fresh record. The catalyst was a jobs number that came in well below expectations, and Wall Street responded by deciding the Federal Reserve now has very little reason to do anything aggressive with interest rates.
The numbers that moved markets
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that nonfarm payrolls grew by just 57,000 jobs in June. The market had been expecting somewhere between 110,000 and 115,000 new jobs. That’s not a small miss. That’s roughly half the anticipated figure.
It gets softer. The May payroll figure, which had originally come in at 172,000, was revised down to 129,000. In other words, the prior month’s jobs story was also weaker than anyone thought at the time.
