Monthly employment report on Friday will be interesting

The monthly employment report for February will be coming out on Friday. Although the employment trend tends to be rather volatile, this report will give us a fairly good clue as to whether the economy is hanging in there or falling off a cliff into recession.

Normal monthly volatility (noise) might be in a range of +150,000 to -150,000 jobs. That's a mere +/- 0.1% of the current payroll employment of 137,258,000.

If we see a loss of jobs worse than -250,000 (and see that order of loss for multiple near-consecutive months), then it will be safe to presume that the economy is really hurting, but if we see any kind of gain or only a modest loss within the range of volatility, then we need to give the economy a free pass for another month. In my view, the economy has quite a number of semi-decent months ahead of it.

-- Jack Krupansky