US Job Growth Collapses To Just 22K, Unemployment Rate Rises To 4.3% Putting 50bps Rate Cut In Play

Ahead of today’s jobs report, consensus was that a print between 40K and 100K is largely priced in and greenlighting a 25bps rate cut by the Fed in two weeks, and that we would need a real outlier number for the Fed to either cut 50bps… or not hike. Well, we got a real outlier when moments ago the BLS reported that in August the US added only 22K jobs, a big drop from the upward revised 79K (from 73K previously) but more importantly June was revised from 27K to -13K, ushering in the first negative jobs print since 2020.

The number came in far below Wall Street estimates of a 75K print. In fact, it was higher than just one of the 80 estimates provided to Bloomberg.

Developing.