Friday’s nonfarm payrolls will further inform the state of the US labour market on the path to the next policy decision by the Federal Reserve on January 28th. A small gain of 25k with a slight decline in the unemployment rate to 4.5% is expected. Consensus is somewhat higher on the magnitude of the gain. Nobody should have much confidence in their estimates for this reading given low data quality but data collection has returned to its pre-shutdown state which wasn’t great to begin with. There are very few advance labour market readings available so far but we’ll get more next week ahead of payrolls. Consumer ... (full story)