Stocks took it on the chin yesterday as investors headed for the exits, uneasy about the economy and the jobs market.
So just now they’re getting antsy?
The Dow Jones industrial average slipped 1.4 percent to below 15,000, as every know-it-all on Wall Street feared a weaker-than- expected number from the Labor Department tomorrow.
The consensus is that the US economy created around 175,000 jobs in May.
I know only one thing: Friday’s figure from Labor will include a hefty 200,000 or so jobs the government assumes — but can’t prove — were created by companies that just came into existence in May.
It’s hard to figure out what Wall Street wants right now: a strong employment report that shows the economy is surviving if not thriving? Or a weak one that goes some way toward assuring investors that Ben Bernanke and his Federal Reserve will continue to be cooperative?
For nearly five years, it was easy to understand what Wall Street wanted: moderately disappointing news to entice the Fed to keep printing money via quantitative easing.
But tomorrow’s job figure is a lot trickier than in the past, especially with the stock market getting queasy.
On the one hand, Wall Street would like healthy job growth because it would mean that the economy might be getting better and corporate profits healthier.
But stronger growth will also cause concerns that the Fed might pull back on its $85 billion-a-month purchases of bonds.
Several Fed governors have already called for a pullback in QE, including Kansas City Fed President Esther George, who said yesterday she supports slowing the pace of purchases as “an appropriate next step for monetary policy.”
That’s not what Wall Street wants to hear. The billions of dollars in additional currency printed by the Fed over the past five years have not done much to improve the nation’s economy.
But QE has pumped up the stock market. And that has benefited those investors who are comfortable with taking risks.
But QE has hurt savers, folks who’ve also had to cut back on spending because the income from their bank accounts is down significantly.
Criticism that QE is favoring richer people who are comfortable taking on risk and hurting the conservative middle class is starting to get to the Fed.
Welcome to the real world, bankers.
There are other problems with QE. So far the Fed has been very successful in keeping interest rates low. But there could come a time when investors around the world revolt against what the Fed is doing.
If people move their money out of dollar-denominated assets — including government bonds — interest rates will rise.
The Fed, meanwhile, will have no way of bringing borrowing costs down. Higher interest rates will mean that companies pay more to borrow money, which will reduce corporate profits and stifle growth.
And that would occur at a time when neither corporate earnings nor revenues are expanding by much.
Japan, which recently instituted a huge QE program of its own, has already seen a big jump in interest rates and a severe decline in stock prices.
What if tomorrow’s employment numbers are weak? That’ll give Wall Street something different to worry about.
Job growth of, say, just 100,000 will curtail fear that the Fed might change on a dime its accommodative monetary policy.
A gradual slowdown of QE’s money printing — which is inevitable sometime this year — won’t become a hot issue for another few months if the economy is obviously in trouble.
But weak job growth will again focus Wall Street’s attention on the price of stocks.
Wall Street is counting on a big jump in corporate profits to justify the heights to which stock prices have climbed. (And it’ll be a miracle if those expectations are met.)
So a bad job report could cause a stock market sell-off like yesterday’s.
The fact that 200,000 or so phantom jobs will be added to the May count doesn’t guarantee a strong report tomorrow.
For one thing, those 200,000 jobs are tacked onto the nation’s job figures before seasonal adjustment.
After adjusting for the seasons, only about 20,000 to 30,000 of those 200,000 jobs will show up in the total job growth that Labor will report.
If the job market is really as weak as it appears, the optimistic guesses at phantom jobs will only make the totals look a little better than they actually are.
If true growth is somehow miraculously strong, the addition of those 20,000 to 30,000 seasonally adjusted jobs could make the figure unacceptably strong for a Fed that is already squabbling over the future of QE.
Tomorrow is going to be a very interesting day.
So grab a breakfast burrito and wait for Labor’s big announcement.