It's Now Clear That We've Started The Year With A Ton Of Great Economic Data
And it's clear we're off to a great start.
In fact, some of the biggest areas of concern are specifically being alleviated by what we're getting.
Non-Farm Payrolls added 155K in January, though the revisions to December and November were so solid, that the trajectory of the labor economy looks very nice.
Crucially, University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment showed a surprise jump in January, which is huge, since this directly contradicts a weak consumer sentiment survey that we got earlier this month. This question of consumer sentiment is massively important, because the increase in the payroll tax (via the expiration of the payroll tax holiday) is one of the biggest reasons to worry about the economy. If sentiment is holding up, that's great.
In addition to this, we got a super-strong ISM (with great internals related to hiring and new orders) and construction spending which grew stronger than people were expecting.