Strong US Claims data offer another piece of the jobs market puzzle

The weekly jobless claims report was noticeably better than expected for the third consecutive week.

Last week 779K Americans applied for Initial Jobless Claims vs 812K a week earlier, against an expected increase to 828K. Continued Claims fell to 4,592K, against 4,785K a week earlier and markedly better than the expected 4700K.

We continue to piece together the puzzle of US labour market data ahead of Friday’s NFP release.

Like yesterday’s ADP report, the fresh data is encouraging as we wait for the official labour market report. In this regard, 200-300K new jobs in January would not be such a surprise after initial average forecasts at the beginning of the week of 55K new jobs.

As a result, we see a stronger momentum for the dollar. At the same time, the healthy data is so far causing a simultaneous bounce for the US shares.

The FxPro Analyst Team