opinioni vari sui payroll di venerdì:
From the investment banks:
Merrill Lynch’s David Rosenberg (7 Sep):
Today’s employment report was very clearly the weakest of this cycle and vividly portrays a recession-bound economy. For the first time since August 2003 (when the funds rate was 1% and the 10-year note yield was 3.5%), nonfarm payrolls fell outright – by 4,000 versus a consensus estimate of +100,000. And there were significant downward revisions to June and July totaling 81,000 (July now at 68,000 versus 92,000 before; June now 69,000 versus 126,000 previously). Given the “noise” inherent in the high-frequency data flow, it’s always best to look at three-month averages and on this score, nonfarm payrolls are running at 44,000, which is a huge downdraft from the 108,000 tally in July and the 195,000 trend at the turn of the year. While the August decline in payrolls may well have been exaggerated for a variety of reasons – not even we were prepared for a 46,000 job meltdown in manufacturing employment or a likely seasonally-induced 35,000 slide in government education jobs – there is absolutely no questioning the sharp loss of momentum in the labor market.
This is no longer about Wall Street, it’s about Main Street.
The unemployment rate did indeed manage to stabilize at 4.6% but that is terribly misleading because the labor force imploded by 340,000 as the lineup of discouraged workers got even longer. The participation rate dropped to 65.8% – the lowest since Jan/05 – from 66.1%, and if not for that huge move the headline unemployment rate would have come in at 4.9%. In fact, if the participation rate had merely stayed at the level it was at the end of last year (when it was 66.4%), the unemployment rate would already be at 5.4% and the recession scenario a that level would be less a debate and more a reality.
… the Fed has left the funds rate too high for too long, and in our view
has no mandate to ratify a destabilizing recession with core inflation below 2%.
There is at least 100 basis points to go just to get to policy neutrality…
The investment message is simple. Buy Treasury bonds. If we are indeed on the path of a recession or something resembling one, history shows that they generate an average annual return of close to 20%.
HSBC (7 Sep)
Overall, today’s payroll data solidifies out expectations of a 50bp Fed cut on September 18, given the on-going stresses in money markets. Still, in an effort to shore up confidence, Fed officials may play down the weakness of this report by stressing that it is inly one report. Other reports, like consumer confidence, jobless claims, ISM indexes, chain store sales and auto sales gave shown reasonable outcomes recently, and Q3 GDP growth does still look to be on track for about 2.5% after 4% in Q2. However, we remain of the view that the official unemployment rate will head up to 5.2% about mid-2008.
UBS, Maury Harris (7 Sep)
The sample for today’s report would have been the week ending on August 19, shortly after financial market turmoil intensified earlier in August, although probably still too early to capture much effect of the turmoil. The implication is that the labor market was already weakening significantly.
In summary, these data were much weaker than expected. Of course, the payrolls data can be volatile, cautioning against taking the weakness too literally. Spending and output data have not corroborated the degree of weakness, and jobless claims have shown a relatively small rise thus far. Weakness in employment in August was also signaled by ADP and ISM employment data, however.
The very weak report clearly consolidates the already strong case for a funds rate cut at the September 18 meeting, and we already thought the risk of 50 bps was greater than the risk of no cut at that meeting, but we still think -25 bps is most likely. And a 25 bps cut in the funds rate could be accompanied by another 50 bps cut in the discount rate. We have changed our fed funds forecast for coming months somewhat, however; we are now calling for 75 bps of easing by year-end instead of 50 bps (with 25bps at each remaining meeting).
un rimbarzino dopo il -2% è d'uopo 
