After Friday’s disastrous labor report, financial scribes are poring over other economic data (that is, when they’re not marveling at levitating stock prices) in an attempt to figure out what the heck is going on in the nation’s labor market and a few of them (see here and here) have homed in on the startling decline in the Federal Reserve’s all-encompassing Labor Market Conditions Index, reproduced below courtesy of the St. Louis Fed.
After this many months below zero on the y-axis, history shows that interest rate cuts are more likely than rate hikes, meaning that, absent a significant change to the slope of that curve, it’ll be “one and done” for this rate hike cycle.
