“Beyond the disappointing headline number, which could be owing to seasonality quirks, the rest of the report is actually pretty strong and is unlikely to deter the Fed from its hawkish turn earlier in the week,” Fiona Cincotta, senior financial markets analyst at, said in a note to clients. Friday’s jobs report wasn’t weak enough to change the market’s view that the Fed could push up the timing of rate increases as it looks to tamp down inflation. The muddled jobs report added to economic uncertainty brought on by the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, which has led to renewed pandemic restrictions.Īdding to the recent turbulence are shifting expectations for how quickly the Federal Reserve will wind down a bond-buying program put in place early in the pandemic - a move that is a precursor to interest rate increases, which are expected to begin next year. Treasury dropped to about 1.35 percent, a sign that investors were moving money to the relative safety of government bonds. In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year U.S. The S&P 500 closed about 1 percent lower after starting the day with a small gain. Trading was volatile, as it has been all week. But the report also showed that the unemployment rate had dropped, and the overall participation rate, which measures the proportion of Americans who either have jobs or are looking for one, rose to its healthiest level since the start of the pandemic. employers added 210,000 jobs in November, the Labor Department said on Friday, far below expectations for a 550,000 gain and a sharp slowdown from October.
Stocks on Wall Street slid on Friday after a report on the state of the labor market sent mixed signals about the economic recovery and as market turbulence triggered by the Omicron variant continued.