Good Friday is next week and the markets will be closed as usual. What will be unusual, however, is that the closure of financial exchanges in the US and some other parts of the world is because the government is about to issue a major report on employment in the midst of a pandemic.
Why is the stock market closed while federal data is released? That’s because Good Friday, April 2 this year, is not a federal holiday.
It is quite rare for the government to release much of the data because market participants cannot respond to it.
And it’s only happened 12 times since 1980, according to Dow Jones Market Data, with the last being in 2015, and before that, it happened in 2012 and 2010.
|
Year |
Dates on which the non-farm payrolls are released on Good Friday |
|
1980 |
April 4 |
|
1983 |
April 1st |
|
1985 |
April 5th |
|
1988 |
April 1st |
|
1994 |
April 1st |
|
1996 |
April 5th |
|
1999 |
April 2 |
|
2007 |
6 April |
|
2010 |
April 2 |
|
2012 |
6 April |
|
2015 |
April 3rd |
|
2021 |
April 2 (planned) |
| Source: Dow Jones Market Data |
The Jobs Report may be the grandfather of economic reports, outside of GDP, but its importance has been amplified by the pandemic, especially as market participants seek more evidence on the magnitude of the upswing in a year to one of the worst public health crises in a year . century.
The latest jobs report will come as investors are unclear about the extent to which the labor market and / or the economy could fully recover, or even overheat, potentially forcing the Federal Reserve to act quickly to cut uncontrolled inflation, with the roll-out of vaccines and about $ 1.9 trillion in new fiscal aid have supported the economy.
Fed chief Jerome Powell has tried to calm the nervous markets by emphasizing that the central bank will take a slow approach to normalizing policies, which itself is expected to take years.
National Securities’ chief market strategist Art Hogan told MarketWatch that it may be a good thing that the jobs report comes when the market is closed.
“Having the weekend to digest this news and calibrate what it means for economic expansion, that could be a good thing for the market,” Hogan said.
A year ago, nonfarm payrolls in the US fell 663,000 in March, while the unemployment rate jumped from 8.1% to its 26-year high at 8.5%.
The March 2021 Jobs Report is expected to show a gain of 655,000 based on some estimates, after payrolls showed that unemployment fell to 6.2% as 379,000 jobs were added in February, which is the largest such gain in four months.
Some pause for the financial markets may be warranted, Hogan says, as the economy still has a long way to go to a healthy recovery.
“We still have maybe nine million people in the workforce. We will need some blockbuster levels to get to the pre-pandemic level, ”said the analyst, who estimated that the economy would need to have an average of 750,000 jobs per month to reach post-COVID levels.
“It would take us two years, so we really need to start collecting those numbers,” he said.
Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA,
the S&P 500 index SPX,
the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP,
and the Russell 2000 index small capitalization RUT,
ended sharply higher after a choppy trading week that ended with a boom at the end of the session.
Certainly it will be difficult to say how robust the trading action could be on the Monday following Good Friday, as a number of global exchanges will close in observance of Easter Monday.