Someone call in the vice principal for student discipline! The market is bullying the Federal Reserve again.
Jobless claims barely budged, inching up 2,000 to 230,000. Weirdly enough, that is just the four week moving average of claims of 230,750, which was just about where the average was the week before. Jobless claims, in short, areat a level that suggests that demand for labor is sufficiently strong to keep layoffs at bay.
. Keep in mind that there was almost no data that emerged on Friday to support this change of view. The only big news we got was the University of Michigan survey of consumers showing that inflation expectations fell to 2.7 percent. While that will be welcome news to the Fed’s expectation-watchers, it hardly warrants a half-point cut.Watching the markets move on Friday, you got the sense that there was a sort of circular confirmation occurring.