Big job cuts number raises the stakes for initial jobless claims and non-farm payrolls

The Challenger Job Cuts number today showed 172K job cuts compared to 49K previously in a sign we could get a soft jobless claims number today and a poor non-farm payrolls number on Friday. It’s the highest number of job cuts since 2020.

That said, the initial jobless claims report doesn’t include federal employees so we could see some relief (USD strength) on an improvement in claims. However they may be some reluctance to buy that headline because Friday’s non-farm payrolls number could be weak.

Also notable is that we get the January full trade balance report at the bottom of the hour. The advance number kicked off some serious US growth worries as imports surged to front-run tariffs. That has the Atlanta Fed GDPNow tracker running at -2.8% q/q and a big deficit would underscore it.

We also get US unit labor cost numbers and Canadian trade balance numbers that could show the opposite of the US — a surge in exports to beat tariff deadlines.

For more on what’s expected, see the economic calendar.

This article was written by Adam Button at www.forexlive.com.