La fuerte creación de empleo haría que él Fed subiera los intereses como lo había planeado. (En Abril)
Analysis: Jobs Report Could Put April, June Rate Increases in Play
The Federal Reserve building in Washington. ENLARGE
The Federal Reserve building in Washington. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News
By
David Harrison
Updated March 4, 2016 9:47 a.m. ET
Friday’s jobs report is the latest piece of good economic news for the Federal Reserve and reinforces the notion that the U.S. economy is getting stronger despite turbulence abroad. While that probably isn’t enough to prompt the central bank to raise interest rates this month, it could bolster the case for moving at its meetings in April or June.
The report likely will accentuate a growing split among Fed officials. On one side are regional Fed bank presidents such as San Francisco’s John Williams, Richmond’s Jeffrey Lacker and Kansas City’s Esther George who continue to press for rate increases this year. In the other camp are policy makers who prefer to take a more cautious approach and wait until the effects of the global financial turmoil and the fall in oil prices have played themselves out. Count the Dallas Fed’s Robert Steven Kaplan, Boston’s Eric Rosengren and Philadelphia’s Patrick Harker among them.
Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen has nodded to both camps but so far has declined to pick a side publicly. So has her top deputy, Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer.
Employers added a seasonally adjusted 242,000 jobs in February, and the unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.9%, according to the Labor Department. Employment gains in January and December—when fears of a global recession spiked—were also revised upward, suggesting the U.S. skirted right past the worst of the global financial upheavals.
The report also found wages rising 2.2% on the year. While that is a slower pace than in prior months, it is still consistent with a tightening jobs market. Meanwhile, the labor-force participation rate rose to 62.9% in February, the highest level in a year. All in all, the report says exactly what Ms. Yellen wants it to say: Wages are rising, discouraged workers are coming off the sidelines and labor-market slack is diminishing.
That follows last week’s Commerce Department report showing an uptick in inflation. The personal consumption expenditures price index, the Fed’s preferred gauge, rose 1.3% in January from the previous year. While that’s still below the central bank’s 2% target, it is a significant boost over the December annual increase, which clocked in at a mere 0.7%.
Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called “core” inflation sits at a relatively healthy 1.7%. In December, Fed officials didn’t think core inflation would exceed 1.6% by the end of the year.
Friday’s bullish job report could help the Williams/Lacker/George camp press their case at the central bank’s March meeting that the U.S. economy is picking up speed, despite the uncertainty gripping global financial markets. They also can point to a slowly improving stock market as evidence.
On Wednesday, Mr. Williams sounded ready to consider rate increases in the not-too-distant future. “We don’t want to run a hot economy too long,” he said. “We have to take the punch bowl away just as the party is starting to get fun.”
Even, as is likely, if the Fed decides to hold rates steady at their meeting March 15-16, the relatively strong data could give officials an incentive to drop hints about a possible move in the coming months, perhaps as soon as the next meeting on April 26-27, an approach they took last October.
For now, investors seem to think the wait-and-see camp will prevail. Market participants aren’t pegging a 50% or more probability of another rate increase until late this year.
If they are right, Ms. Yellen will have a delicate communications task ahead of her at the news conference following the March 15-16 meeting. She will have to explain why central bankers are hesitant to move despite a recent batch of strong data showing a strong and resilient labor market and firming evidence of rising wages and inflation.
Fed officials, chief among them Ms. Yellen, have repeated for months that their interest-rate decisions will depend on the economic data. It could be harder to make that case if it appears the central bank is acting contrary to increasingly strong data.
Write to David Harrison at
david.harrison@wsj.com