by Tyler Durden
Monday, Apr 12, 2021 - 09:44 AM
Looking at the busy week ahead, the pandemic will remain in focus as the new case count is still moving higher at the global level even if the US now appears to have left covid behind. In the week ending last Friday April 9, the numbers recorded by John Hopkins University showed a 4.45m increase in cases globally, which compares with increases of 4.11m, 3.78m and 3.29m in the 3 weeks before that, so as Deutsche Bank notes, we ve seen an acceleration in the past month, although the rate of increase is still shy of the peaks in December and January.
The coming week is packed with Federal Reserve speakers and important data, including a much anticipated inflation reading Tuesday, when the consumer price index is released. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell kicks off another busy week for Fed appearances with a Sunday evening interview on 60 Minutes. He also speaks Wednesday at an Economic Club of Washington event.
Powell, in comments this past week, continued to reinforce that the Fed will keep its easy policies in place for a long time, and that any emergence of inflation should be temporary. But hotter-than-expected producer price inflation data Friday has made the consumer price index release Tuesday all the more important. PPI gained 1%, double the expected increase.
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If the February US jobs report signaled that America is truly rounding the final corner on the Covid-19 pandemic, then after a month of ramped up vaccinations and warmer weather, the latest data suggest that the world’s largest economy is now in an all-out sprint to herd immunity and a full reopening.
US employers added 916,000 jobs in March, easily beating the 660,000 gain projected by economists in a Bloomberg survey and surpassing even the more optimistic crowd-sourced “whisper number” of 800,000. The unemployment rate fell to 6%, matching estimates, while the labor force participation rate ticked higher to 61.5%, though it remains stubbornly close to the most depressed level since the 1970s. February’s payroll additions were revised higher by 89,000 to 468,000, meaning that combined with the new March figures from the Labor Department, the US gained just more than a million jobs.