A Strong Jobs Report Friday Could Doom Biden’s $1.9 Trillion Stimulus
The President would face even more pushback over the big spending plan.
President Biden might be of two minds about Friday’s employment report. Robust job growth would be good, of course, but it could undermine the rationale for the $1.9 trillion rescue package that’s the top priority of his young administration. “It could take out some of the urgency,” Michelle Meyer, head of U.S. economics at Bank of America Corp., told Rich Miller of Bloomberg News.
The unpredictability of the coronavirus pandemic’s effects has left economists unusually divided over what the Bureau of Labor Statistics will say. Two of the outfits surveyed by Bloomberg Economics, TD Securities (USA) and Wrightson Icap LLC, are expecting the BLS to say U.S. employment grew by 400,000 in January. At the other extreme, Barclays Capital Inc. and Credit Suisse Securities (USA) estimate employment shrank by 100,000—and one, Berliner Sparkasse, estimates employment shrank by 250,000.