Good Friday is next week and the markets will remain closed as usual. However, what will be unusual is that the closure of financial exchanges in the US and in some other parts of the world comes as the government publishes a key report on employment in the midst of a pandemic.
Why does the stock market close while federal data is released? This is because Good Friday, this year on April 2, is not a federal holiday.
It is rare for the government to publish a significant part of the data, as market participants cannot react to it.
And it’s only happened 12 times since 1980, according to Dow Jones Market Data, with the last time it happened in 2015, and before that it happened in 2012 and 2010.
|
Course |
Dates that non-agricultural payrolls have been published on Good Friday |
|
1980 |
April 4th |
|
1983 |
April 1st |
|
1985 |
April 5th |
|
1988 |
April 1st |
|
1994 |
April 1st |
|
1996 |
April 5th |
|
1999 |
April 2nd |
|
2007 |
April 6 |
|
2010 |
April 2nd |
|
2012 |
April 6 |
|
2015 |
April 3rd |
|
2021 |
April 2 (scheduled) |
| Source: Dow Jones Market Data |
The jobs report is certainly the grandfather of economic reports, outside of GDP, but its importance has been amplified by the pandemic, especially as market participants look for more evidence on the magnitude of the rebound in the year in one of the worst public health crises century.
The latest job report will come as investors are unclear about the extent to which the labor market and / or the economy could fully recover, or even overheat, forcing the Federal Reserve to act. quickly to curb inflation out of control. the deployment of vaccines and about $ 1.9 trillion in new tax aid have helped strengthen the economy.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has tried to pacify the nervous markets by stressing that the central bank will take a slow approach to normalizing policy, which is expected to be years away.
Art Hogan, market strategist at National Securities, told MarketWatch that it may be good for the jobs report to arrive as the market closes.
“Having the weekend to digest this news and gauge what that means for economic expansion, that can be a good thing for the market,” Hogan said.
A year ago, U.S. non-farm payrolls fell 663,000 in March, while the unemployment rate jumped to a 26.5-year high of 8.5% from 8.1%.
According to some estimates, the March 2021 employment report is expected to show a gain of 655,000, after payroll data showed that unemployment fell to 6.2%, with 379,000 jobs added. work in February, which was the biggest gain in four months.
It may take a while to stop in the financial markets, Hogan says, because the economy still has a long way to go to achieve a healthy recovery.
“We still have maybe nine million people out of the active population. We will need some levels of overproduction to reach pre-pandemic levels, ”the analyst said, estimating that the economy would have to do an average of about 750,000 jobs a month to reach post-COVID levels.
“It would take us two years, so we really have to start taking those numbers,” he said.
On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA,
the S&P 500 SPX index,
the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP,
and the Russell 2000 small-cap RUT index,
it ended strongly higher, after a week of negotiation that ended with a flowery final session.
Of course, it will be difficult to tell the robustness of trading stocks on Monday after Good Friday, because several global stock exchanges will close on Easter Monday.