, Columnist
Shocking Jobs Miss Rips Up Traders’ Playbooks
U.S. employers added just 266,000 workers in April, compared with estimates for 1 million, spurring a rally in bonds and tech stocks as investors rethink the reopening.
The reopening narrative has been upended.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
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This was supposed to be a U.S. jobs report for the ages. One million more Americans were expected to be added to nonfarm payrolls — and perhaps even 2 million — in a sign that the world’s largest economy was breaking out of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Instead, when the dust settled, it looked as if the U.S. labor market had hardly made any strides forward — and certainly nothing close to the Federal Reserve’s benchmark of “substantial further progress.”