The U.S. bond market was rising Wednesday, as investors assessed revisions to labor-market data and looked ahead to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s Jackson Hole speech Friday.
Payroll growth now appears weaker than earlier estimated, but the economy is hardly “falling off a cliff,” according to Kathy Jones, chief fixed-income strategist at Charles Schwab. The U.S. still has a “pretty healthy pace of jobs growth and a growing economy,” she said in a phone interview, although there’s a “trend toward cooling off.”
That’s why Treasury yields drifted “a little bit” lower Wednesday morning after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its preliminary revisions to U.S. jobs data for the 12 months through March, according to Jones.
The revisions translated into slower jobs growth on average per month over that period, supporting “the idea that we’ll get rate cuts and that yields will continue to come down,” she said. “But everybody is waiting for Powell,” Jones added, referring to the Fed chair’s upcoming speech Friday at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium.
Many investors anticipate that the Fed will begin lowering its benchmark rate at its next policy meeting in September, as inflation has eased significantly and the labor market has softened.