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<\/p>\nThe Wmax macro research team believes that the April U.S. non-farm payrolls report released last Friday is a very confusing \"double-sided data\" - on the surface, the 115,000 new jobs were far higher than the market's expectations of 62,000, achieving two consecutive months of growth for the first time in the past year, and the unemployment rate stabilized at a relatively low level of 4.3%; but peeling away the overall data, the structural worries of the U.S. labor market have fully emerged, which is why gold ignored the \"nominal positive\" short-term rise. 20 dollars, the core reason for the slight decline in the U.S. dollar index. The final signal sent by this report is extremely clear: the U.S. economy is in a fragile balance that \"appears to be stable, but is actually weak\", and the Fed's policy tone of staying on hold for the year has basically been locked in.<\/p>\n
The Wmax team has always emphasized that judging the health of the labor market cannot only look at new employment and unemployment rate data, but must combine data revisions, household surveys and industry structures for multi-dimensional disassembly. In this report, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' revisions to the data for the first two months have exposed the marginal attenuation of employment momentum: February's non-farm employment was revised down by 23,000 to a decrease of 156,000. Although March was revised upward by 7,000 to 185,000, the total for the two months was still 16,000 less than the initial value. The deterioration of February's employment data was far beyond what the market had previously recognized.<\/p>\n
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What deserves more vigilance is the \u201chidden recession\u201d signal conveyed by household surveys. As early as March, the Wmax macro team suggested in its monthly strategy report that the \"low stabilization\" of the U.S. unemployment rate is being overdrawn by the decline in the labor force participation rate. This data just confirms this judgment: the number of employed persons in the household survey in April has declined for the fourth consecutive month, and the labor force participation rate fell to 61.8%, a new low since October 2021; the broad unemployment rate, including part-time workers and discouraged job seekers, has risen to 8.2%, the highest level this year. As \"Fed mouthpiece\" Nick Timiraos pointed out, the unemployment rate is not rising not because more people have found jobs, but because a large number of people have completely dropped out of the labor market. If calculated based on the labor force participation rate in 2024, the current actual unemployment rate in the United States is as high as 5.3%, which is much higher than the official 4.3%.<\/p>\n
From the perspective of industry structure, the differentiation of the job market has further intensified. The healthcare, transportation and warehousing industries have become the main employment drivers, and the construction, leisure and entertainment and hotel industries have rebounded for two consecutive months after the winter disturbance subsided, with data center construction becoming the core support for labor demand in the construction industry. However, at the same time, employment in the information industry has declined for the 16th consecutive month. Technology giants such as Meta and Microsoft continue to lay off employees to offset the huge expenditures in the field of artificial intelligence, and the number of federal government employment continues to decrease. This pattern of \"partial support but overall weakness\" means that the U.S. labor market has not achieved a real recovery, but has only maintained a tepid state of \"low layoffs and weak recruitment.\"<\/p>\n
The Wmax macro team believes that it is never the data itself that is priced by the market, but the expected difference behind the data. Gold's rise against the trend after the release of non-agricultural data this time is essentially a complete falsification of the market's expectation that the \"Fed will turn hawkish again\", coupled with the resonance of safe-haven demand caused by rising macro uncertainty.<\/p>\n
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As a zero-interest asset, gold's price trend is highly negatively correlated with real interest rates, and the expectations of interest rate hikes triggered by the \"wage-price spiral\" are the core negative factors that suppress gold. However, in this report, the obvious slowdown in wage growth completely dispelled the market\u2019s concerns about an inflation rebound: average hourly wages in April only increased by 0.2% month-on-month and 3.6% year-on-year, both in a moderate range. The last piece of the puzzle for an inflation rebound is not in place. That means the Fed doesn't need to tighten further to curb inflation, and the reaction in the interest rate swap market confirms this: traders are betting heavily on the Fed keeping borrowing costs unchanged for the year, and even putting a 40% chance of raising interest rates by April 2027. When the sword of Damocles hanging over gold's head was removed from the \"interest rate hike\", worries about long capital positions disappeared instantly.<\/p>\n
At the same time, macro-level uncertainty further activated gold\u2019s safe-haven premium. The geopolitical and policy risks that the Wmax team continues to track show that there are currently growing differences within the Federal Reserve over the energy shock caused by the Iran war. Some officials have expressed clear concerns that rising energy prices may push up inflation while suppressing consumer demand, ultimately forming a \"stagflation\" pattern. Once companies begin large-scale layoffs due to rising costs and weak demand, the current fragile employment balance will collapse in an instant. In this context, the allocation value of gold as a traditional safe-haven asset has significantly increased.<\/p>\n
Based on this non-agricultural data and various recent economic indicators, the Wmax macro team determines that the Federal Reserve will continue to maintain a \"no-touch\" policy stance for a long time to come. On the one hand, although there are hidden worries in the labor market, the overall situation is still relatively stable, layoffs remain low, tax cuts have also provided certain support for consumption and corporate investment, and there is no urgent need to cut interest rates.<\/p>\n
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On the other hand, the slowdown in wage growth means that inflationary pressure is controllable. At the same time, the risk of stagflation caused by energy shocks has not yet fully emerged, and the Federal Reserve does not need to restart raising interest rates. BlackRock portfolio manager Jeffrey Rosenberg defined the report as a \"status report\" from the Fed, which is highly consistent with the previous judgment of the Wmax team.<\/p>\n
For the market, this \"lukewarm\" non-agricultural report is relatively beneficial to risk assets in the medium term, but investors need to be wary of the gradual pricing of forward recession risks. Wmax always insists on starting from the data structure and penetrating the macroscopic appearance to capture the real logic of the market. This is also the core of our ability to prompt gold allocation opportunities in advance when most institutions misjudge non-agricultural negative gold. In the future, we will continue to track U.S. inflation data, Fed officials\u2019 speeches and changes in the geopolitical situation to provide investors with more forward-looking reference for decision-making.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wmax interprets U.S. non-farm data in April: 115,000 new jobs were created, exceeding expectations, but the labor participation rate fell to 61.8%, a new low since 2021, and the broad unemployment rate rose to 8.2%. Slowing wage growth has dispelled concerns about inflation, gold bucked the trend and has risen, and the Federal Reserve has locked in a no-movement tone for the year.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[121],"tags":[1019,179,340,1018],"class_list":["post-9878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-financial-news","tag-1019","tag-179","tag-340","tag-1018"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kpai1.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kpai1.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kpai1.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kpai1.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kpai1.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9878"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kpai1.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9883,"href":"https:\/\/www.kpai1.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9878\/revisions\/9883"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kpai1.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kpai1.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kpai1.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kpai1.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}