But Wall Street tends to quickly get sucked into emotional ebb and flow. In the case of the past couple of months, they’ve been adjusting down the bar for earnings and the economy, and we get positive surprises, which are good for stocks. Today’s number was a big positive surprise — 304k added jobs.
Maybe a more interesting number was the manufacturing number.
The economic activity in the manufacturing sector continued to expand in January, and came in hotter than expected. In a month of January, where all we heard was the story of slowdown, the nation’s supply executives broadly reported the manufacturing sector to be growing, and a faster clip.
Meanwhile, the inflation component came in softer. And as you can see in the chart below, it has been on the slide.