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The big January jobs report comes out Friday. Here’s what to expect

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A hiring sign is posted on the door of a Taco Bell on August 22, 2024 in Alexandria, Virginia. 

Anna Rose Layden | Getty Images

The U.S. labor market likely began 2025 in solid fashion, if a bit of a step down from where it closed the previous year.

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its nonfarm payrolls count for January, it is projected to show growth of 169,000, down from 256,000 in December but nearly in line with the past three-month average. The unemployment rate is projected to stay at 4.1%, according to the Dow Jones consensus for the report, which will be out Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET.

While the takeaway could be that job creation is slowing, the broader view is that the employment picture is holding solid, and it’s not likely to be a problem for the Federal Reserve anytime in the near future.

“With inflation at least for now at tolerable levels and firms very comfortable making sustained investment, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t continue to see job growth around 150,000 per month, which is the upper end of what’s needed to keep the labor market stable,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. “In other words, we’re at full employment. This is a good problem to have.”

By the time the Fed concluded its final three meetings of 2024, it had cut its key borrowing rate by a full percentage point. In good part, this was because policymakers sought to support a labor market that showed signs of weakening.

However, recent indicators show that while hiring has leveled off, layoffs aren’t increasing and workers aren’t quitting though job openings are on the decline.

Such relative stability is a welcome sign with the likelihood that the Fed will be on hold, possibly until summer, while officials wait to see the fallout of President Donald Trump‘s fiscal agenda that includes aggressive tariffs against the largest U.S. trading partners.

“The economy is still going to roll on, people are going to make investment decisions, they’re going to get up each morning and go to work,” Brusuelas said.

Annual revisions to take focus

Though the usual payroll number is expected to show more or less status quo conditions, markets also will be watching annual benchmark revisions to both the establishment and household surveys that the BLS compiles.

When the initial revisions were released in August 2024, they showed a stunning 818,000 fewer jobs created than previously reported in the establishment count from April 2023 to March 2024. That total is expected to come down considerably as adjustments are made for immigration and population.

The revisions also are projected to show a record increase of 3.5 million in the population and 2.3 million in household employment, according to Goldman Sachs. The firm sees more modest adjustments upward in labor force participation and unemployment.

The two BLS surveys have differed sharply in the post-Covid years. The establishment survey is used to calculate the nonfarm payrolls number while the BLS derives the unemployment rate from the household count. The latter has shown a less optimistic view of employment conditions that could be corrected with the revisions.

In any event, if the report comes in anywhere near expectations, it’s unlikely to move the needle for the Fed even with the tariff question lingering.

“The labor market is a lot more important to the Fed than what’s going on with tariffs,” said Eric Winograd, director of developed market economic research at AllianceBernstein. “The payrolls numbers are volatile. Anything can happen in any given month. But there’s nothing in particular that makes me think that this month’s print will look meaningfully different than the past few, and that’s enough to keep the Fed on hold.”

In addition to the headline payroll numbers and revisions, the BLS will release data on average hourly earnings.

The estimate is for January to show a 0.3% increase in wages and a 3.7% 12-month increase. If the annual figure is correct, it will be the lowest level since July 2024.

Economics

Andrew Bailey on why UK-U.S. trade deal won’t end uncertainty

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Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey attends the central bank’s Monetary Policy Report press conference at the Bank of England, in the City of London, on May 8, 2025.

Carlos Jasso | Afp | Getty Images

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey told CNBC on Thursday that the U.K. was heading for more economic uncertainty, despite the country being the first to strike a trade agreement with the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s controversial tariff regime.

“The tariff and trade situation has injected more uncertainty into the situation… There’s more uncertainty now than there was in the past,” Bailey told CNBC in an interview.

“A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement is very welcome in that sense, very welcome. But the U.K. is a very open economy,” he continued.

That means that the impact from tariffs on the U.K. economy comes not just from its own trade relationship with Washington, but also from those of the U.S. and the rest of the world, he said.

“I hope that what we’re seeing on the U.K.-U.S. trade side will be the first of many, and it will be repeated by a whole series of trade agreements, but we have to see that happen of course, and where it actually ends up.”

“Because, of course, we are looking at tariff levels that are probably higher than they were beforehand.”

Trump unveils United Kingdom trade deal, first since ‘reciprocal’ tariff pause

In Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Report released Thursday, the word “uncertainty” was used 41 times across its 97 pages, up from 36 times in February, according to a CNBC tally.

The U.K. central bank cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Thursday, taking its key rate to 4.25%. The decision was highly divided among the seven members of its Monetary Policy Committee, with five voting for the 25 basis point cut, two voting to hold rates and two voting to reduce by a larger 50 basis points.

Bailey said that while some analysts had perceived the rate decision as more hawkish than expected — in other words, leaning toward holding rates elevated than slashing them rapidly — he was not surprised by the close vote.

“What it reflects is that there are two sides, there are risks on both sides here,” he told CNBC.

“We could get a much more severe weakness of demand than we were expecting, that could then pass through to a weaker outlook for inflation than we were expecting.”

“There’s a risk on the other side that we could get some combination of more persistence in the inflation effects that are gradually working their way through the system,” such as in wages and energy, while “supply capacity in the economy is weaker,” he said.

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Economics

Trump knocks down a controversial pillar of civil-rights law

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IN THE DELUGE of 145 executive orders issued by President Donald Trump (on subjects as disparate as “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” and “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads”) it can be difficult to discern which are truly consequential. But one of them, signed on April 23rd under the bland headline “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy”, aims to remake civil-rights law. Those primed to distrust Mr Trump on such matters may be surprised to learn that the president’s target is not just important but also well-chosen.

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Economics

Harvard has more problems than Donald Trump

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A Programme at Harvard Divinity School aspired to “deZionize Jewish consciousness”. During “privilege trainings”, working-class Harvard students were instructed that, by being Jewish, they were oppressing wealthier, better prepared classmates. A course in Harvard’s graduate school of public health, “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health”, sought to “interrogate the relationships between settler colonialism, Zionism, antisemitism, and other forms of racism”: Will these findings by Harvard’s task-force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, released on April 29th, shock anyone? Maybe not. Americans may be numb by now to bulletins about the excesses, not to say inanities, of some leftist academics.

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