Wall Street is on pins and needles waiting for Friday’s pivotal jobs report

Recession fears reignited when the July jobs report came in far weaker than expected and unemployment shot up to 4.3%.

The latter triggered the “Sahm Rule,” an indicator developed by economist Claudia Sahm that posits a recession is imminent or underway if the three-month moving average of the unemployment rate rises by 0.5 percentage points or more relative to its prior 12-month low. Since January, it has risen by 0.6 percentage points.

Rules can be broken, and Sahm herself wrote in an opinion piece for Bloomberg that the US is not in a recession and that her indicator “joins a long list of economic tools skewed by the unusual disruptions of the past four and a half years.”

Then there’s the yield curve, which briefly uninverted Thursday and Wednesday in intraday trading. The spread between 2- and 10-year Treasury yields has closed consistently negative (or inverted) since early July 2022, according to Tradeweb data.

Inversions are typically rare and have long been viewed as recession indicators.

Also, history doesn’t look favorably on the last two times interest rates were this high, noted Chris Rupkey, chief economist at FwdBonds.

“The last two times the Federal Reserve had interest rates at this high of a level, their first rate cuts were [half-point cuts] before the 2001 recession and then the Great Recession,” he wrote. “There are signs of a slowdown in hiring with fewer job openings, but until payroll jobs actually decline there is no recession. At the moment, it does not look like the Fed is behind the curve and can proceed with a regular [quarter point] rate cut.”