Litany Of Morning Data: Productivity, Jobless Claims, Q1 Earnings, Etc.

Thursday, May 4th, 2017

Ahead of opening bell today — because clearly the heaviest week of Q1 earnings reports is not enough for everyone — we see a litany of new economic data, including Q1 Productivity, last week’s Initial Jobless Claims, the March Trade Balance and Unit Labor Costs. And this is the meat in between the employment sandwich of ADP’s private sector payroll report Wednesday and tomorrow’s non-farm payroll report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Get your packs loaded up, we’re ascending the mountain…

Hand in hand with employment figures in the U.S. labor market is productivity of this employment, and as such, economists and other market participants pay close attention to things like this morning’s Q1 Productivity read. It wasn’t good, reporting -0.6% for the first three months of the year.

This is worse than expected, although better than the revision to the Q4 total, which was bumped significantly from -0.3% to -0.8%. Unit Labor Costs rose 3%, more than double the revised read of 1.3% (from 1.7% originally reported). In other words, we’re getting less bang for our employment buck, and it’s costing more too.

Initial Jobless Claims sank back down to its (psychologically pleasing) 225-250K range of the past few months (with a few exceptions, like last week) to a sum of 238K new jobless claims. We saw 257K claims last week, so the drop of 19K week over week is fairly notable. Continuing claims came in below another psychologically pleasing threshold of 2 million at 1.964 million. These figures illustrate a long-term healthy jobs market that has tightened considerably since the bottom fell out at the end of the last decade.

The U.S. labor market continues to see a dearth of skilled positions being filled, with little to no new training programs to help bolster employment coming from the government past the first 100 days of President Trump’s tenure. Yesterday’s private-sector payroll read from ADP saw 177K new jobs having been created in the month of April.

For tomorrow’s BLS survey, analysts are looking for 188K, although this read fell precipitously in March, when the BLS only registered 98K new jobs. Aside from the disparity in such a wide range between results, if we see another heavily disappointing number from the BLS tomorrow morning, expect some downward pressure in stocks with questions about the health of U.S. employment further spreading.

The March Trade Balance fell 0.1% month over month, but remains a significant deficit at $43.7 billion. Again, we’ve yet to see any progress regarding trade deals manifest in the country’s new federal agenda — which some market participants might have already thought would have happened by now — so until changes are made, we can expect our trade balance month over month to remain within a certain range.

Q1 Earnings, Continued

Entertainment conglomerate Viacom (NASDAQ:VIAB) beat expectations on both top and bottom lines before today’s opening bell, beating earnings estimates by 20 cents per share to $0.79. Revenues easily topped the Zacks consensus of $3.056 billion to $3.256 billion. The stronger-than-expected numbers may reflect the recent managerial change at Viacom, although the company stated its future goals will take some time to be reached. For more, click here.

Consumer staples major Kellogg Co. (NYSE:K) topped estimates on its earnings results, but missed on sales projections: $1.06 per share beat our Zacks consensus by 5 cents, but the company’s $3.25 billion in Q1 revenues missed our $3.33 billion expected. Organic revenues were down 4.4% year over year and -1.1% quarter over quarter. For more, click here.

Hyatt Hotels (NYSE:H) posted a huge beat on its bottom line this morning, putting up 73 cents per share in its Q1, more than triple the 24 cents in the Zacks consenus. Revenues also topped expectations with $1.19 billion beating the $1.14 billion we had been looking for. For more, click here.

Mark Vickery
Senior Editor

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