Some excerpts from the jobs report commentaries:
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MATT MCCORMICK, A MONEY MANAGER AT CINCINNATI-BASED BAHL & GAYNOR INC, WHICH HAS $3.2 BILLION IN ASSETS
“All I can say is ’wow.’ You’ve seen optimism start to creep into the market despite the pessimism that’s present in everyone’s mind. We hope this is sustainable. This is the kind of number people wouldn’t have believed until we saw it. Expectations were far under this.”
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LINDSEY PIEGZA, ECONOMIST, FTN FINANCIAL, NEW YORK
“It was a better-than-expected report, the strongest report that we’ve seen in quite some time. The big question is — here’s the thing: the reason we’re seeing the unemployment rate drop is because more and more people are dropping out of the labor force. I know the market wants to rally on this number but remember we need a minimum of 250,000 just to cover demographic change. So we’re almost at the place where we need to be to reabsorb the nine million people who lost their jobs during the Great Recession. This pushes the bar even higher for payrolls for the rest of this year.
“Given that the bar is so low we have to take this in the context that it’s still not good enough.”
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SCOTT BROWN, CHIEF ECONOMIST, RAYMOND JAMES, ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
“We are going to see stocks initially rally on this and it’s going to be negative for bonds. People should take it with a grain of salt since they are January figures and subject to revisions. We also had some unusually mild weather. Still it’s an encouraging report.”