What Friday's stonking US jobs report means for markets

At the end of last week, US employment figures gave everyone a pleasant surprise and sparked hopes of a “V-shaped” recovery. John Stepek explains how the markets reacted, and what it means for you.

© Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The US reported a net gain of 2.5 million jobs © Getty
(Image credit: © Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Before the coronavirus broke out, the monthly US non-farm payrolls figures were one of the most scrutinised pieces of data on the planet. Amid coronavirus and the economic shutdown, the figures lost a lot of their impact.

The weekly jobless claims data was more timely, and the sums were so huge as to become meaningless. How can you make sense of job loss figures when they are driven by an entirely unique situation, and also – you hope – temporary in nature to an extent?

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.