Payrolls Come In Better Than Forecast, Equity Speculators Seem Pleased

The major stock index futures are all up more than 1% with ten minutes to go before the cash market open.

From ZeroHedge, May 2:

April Jobs Unexpectedly Jump By 177,000, Higher Than All Estimates

Ahead of today's jobs report, we knew the number would be a big drop from March's 228K, the only question was how big said drop would be, and whether a tariff hit would be accounted for in today's number (as we said in our preview). We got the answer moments ago when the BLS reported that in April the US added 177K jobs, which while certainly a big drop from last month's 228K, came in well above the Wall Street median estimate of 138K, and clearly indicated that the tariff hit has yet to come.

While hardly a blowout number, today's print was so strong, it came above the highest Wall Street estimate of 171K.

Also notable: taking a page from the Biden playbook, the March jobs report was revised dramatically lower, from 228K to 185K, the third consecutive downward revision of job numbers in a row.

The change in February payrolls was also revised down by 15,000, from +117,000 to +102,000. Combined with the 43,000 downward revision in March, employment in February and March combined is 58,000 lower than previously reported.

The unemployment rate was unchanged as expected, printing at 4.2%, as the number of employed workers rose 436K to 163.944MM, while the number of unemployed rose by 82K to 7.165MM. Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (4.0 percent), adult women (3.7 percent), teenagers (12.9 percent), Whites (3.8 percent), Blacks (6.3 percent), Asians (3.0 percent), and Hispanics (5.2 percent) showed little or no change over the month....

....MUCH MORE, they go deep into the numbers.