The August Jobs Shock and the Reality of Rate Cuts
I have always found it darkly amusing how the market reacts to genuinely good news. Tell an ordinary person the economy just added 162,000 jobs in August, completely smashing the 53,000 that economists had politely guessed, and they might actually smile. Tell a trader, and they will likely start dumping shares in a mild panic.
Welcome to the perverse logic of interest rates.
Good news for the economy is often terrible news for your portfolio.
The numbers from August were impossible to ignore. Unemployment held perfectly steady at 4.1 percent. Yet, look a little closer at the wage growth, and the illusion shatters. Paycheques are simply failing to keep pace with inflation. People are technically employed, but they are getting poorer in real terms. It is a brittle sort of success, and that combination spells trouble for anyone banking on immediate relief from the Federal Reserve.