How Things Stand in the Market as of Sunday, August 25th, 2024

Last week’s headline event was Fed Chair Powell’s speech at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium. Though his dovish speech had an effect on the entire market, it belied a big revision to jobs created for the period of April 2023-March 2024 released the same day as his speech. The release indicated that 818,000 fewer nonfarm payroll jobs were created than was previously thought—with more revisions reportedly expected. That means that going forward, the status of the jobs market will have a disproportionate effect on the Fed’s future interest rate decisions, so this bears watching as we move through the rest of this year. Next week will see a number of possibly market-moving earnings reports, including NetApp (NTAP, Nvidia (NVDA), Safesforce.com (CRM), Marvell Technologies (MRVL), Mongo DB (MDB) and others, as well as the PCE prices and personal income & spending economic reports— both watched closely by the Fed.