Bond markets spent most of Thursday doing what they do best when nobody knows what comes next: almost nothing. Treasury yields barely budged ahead of the August nonfarm payrolls release, with traders content to sit on their hands rather than take a view on whether the Federal Reserve would hike rates again.
Then the jobs report landed, and the calm evaporated.
A number nobody expected
Economists had penciled in somewhere between 53,000 and 56,000 new jobs for August. The actual figure came in at 162,000, roughly three times the consensus estimate. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%.
July’s figures got a second look too. What had initially been recorded as a loss of 23,000 jobs was revised to a gain of 21,000, a swing of 44,000 that quietly made the prior month look considerably healthier.
