The market had expected a small rise from 50.7 to 50.8 points. The employment component rose from 51.9 to 54 points. New orders are at 53.3 points. This is good news, but the bigger sector is services. The ISM Services PMI will be released next week, and we already have the NFP out.
Also construction spending, released at the same time, exceeded expectations: a rise of 0.9% instead of 0.6%. Earlier, Markit’s Manufacturing PMI was revised to the downside: 55.8 instead of 56.1 points in the initial read. This is still a high score, significantly above 50 points that separate growth from contraction.
Consumer sentiment from the University of Michigan was revised to the upside: from 71.3 to 73.8 points, above expectations.
The bigger release of course was the Non-Farm Payrolls: the US gained 157K jobs in January, as expected, but revisions were huge: +127K in total. As the job market improves, more people return to the workforce, and this increases the unemployment rate, even if the total number of workers keeps rising.
Further reading:Â Job Gains of Over 200K Could Lead to Drops in the Unemployment Rate
