Normally, the market is dull and boring the day before the monthly "Jobs Report" is issued, which will be tomorrow. Yet, futures are predicting a bullish day for today.
The economic data released this morning was so positive the market feels confident that tomorrow's report will also be good. The weekly initial claims report this morning was the best since May of 2008. Also, productivity continued to slow. It was 3.9% in 2010, which is good, but slowing to only 2.6% in the fourth quarter. The market suspects that is because employers has wrung about as much additional efficiency out of existing employees as possible and may have to finally increase hiring. Let's hope so!
The good news is that the number of people receiving unemployment compensation dropped from 7.8 million workers to 7.7 million. The bad news is that 7.7 people are receiving compensation. The worse news is that there are millions more who have already exhausted all their benefits and are getting nothing.
The concensus estimate for tomorrow's report is that 185,000 jobs were created in February. This would be a huge improvement over the 36,000 in January, but that number was skewed by the snowstorms. With 185,000 jobs being created each month, it will take 42 months to find jobs for 7.7 million people. That would be September of 2014.
Hold your breath today and hope tomorrow's report is much better than 185,000 . . .
