John Authers, Columnist

Extreme Market Shocks Don't Fade So Easily

Friday’s jobs miss is a reminder that the repercussions of the Covid pandemic are still with us, and hard to judge.

May 10, 2021 at 4:34 AM UTC

John Authers is a senior editor for markets and Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former chief markets commentator at the Financial Times, he is author of “The Fearful Rise of Markets.”

Don’t get complacent.
Photographer: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

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Did I miss anything while I was away? Well, yes I did. Friday brought the monthly download of U.S. employment data, as is customary on the first Friday of the month, and Bloomberg’s survey showed that economists were braced for an increase of almost 1 million in non-farm payrolls. Some expected far better. What happened instead was an increase of only 265,000. With the sole exception of March last year, when the pandemic hit and many forecasters didn’t have time to update their estimates, this was the worst negative surprise since the survey started in 1997: