Our unlikely bet for the month was that the Lakers were going to sweep in the first round. We didn’t want the money anyway…
The bet we should’ve made? That the jobs report would come in hot.
American employers added 177,000 jobs in April, the Labor Department reported Friday, whereas economists FactSet polled expected to see just 135,000 jobs added. The unemployment rate came in unchanged at 4.2%. The job growth in April was stronger than the average pace of the previous three months, per CNN.
As always in our age of uncertainty, timing matters: The figures are from surveys taken just after the Trump administration instituted tariffs in April.
Still, the good news was firmly unexpected. For now, it’s like dodging a bullet—temporarily.
“We can push recession concerns to another month. Job numbers remain very strong, suggesting there was an impressive degree of resilience in the economy in play before the tariff shock,” Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, told CNBC. “The economy will weaken in the coming months but, with this underlying momentum, the US has a decent chance of averting recession if it can step back from the tariff brink in time.”
Economists expect any negative shocks from Trump’s trade wars to show up later in the year.
“Politicians can count their lucky stars that companies are holding on to their workers despite the storm clouds forming that could slow the economy further in the second half of the year,” Christopher Rupkey, chief economist at financial markets research firm fwdbonds, told the AP.
Not long after the jobs report came out, President Donald Trump once again called for the Federal Reserve to lower rates, continuing to ignore the traditional independence between the central bank and the executive branch.
We might stick to betting on basketball.
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