Carter Funeral Suspends Stock Market; What to Expect Friday

Thursday, January 9, 2025

You are watching: Carter Funeral Suspends Stock Market; What to Expect Friday

Stock markets will suspend trading this Thursday, taking a traditional pause for the funeral of a former head of state. James Earl Carter, Jr., known as Jimmy even during his years in the White House (1977-80), was the 39th President of the U.S. He lived to be 100 — the first ex-president in 235 years of presidents to do so.

Carter was also a highly visible altruist following his tenure in office, helping build houses for the poor via his connection with Habitat for Humanity, among other things. The former Georgia governor had been a nuclear engineer while serving in the U.S. Navy and, famously, a peanut farmer in his home town of Plains, GA. He was a progressive liberal by political orientation, and originally an outgoing advocate for the Civil Rights movement in the South.

See more : Stock futures inch higher as the market heads into holiday-shortened week: Live updates

His four years in office were at times quite turbulent, most especially pronounced by the Iran Hostage Crisis, which marred his final year as president. (The hostages were not released until the very day his successor, Ronald Reagan, took office.) But a formal remembrance of a U.S. Presidency is granted to all who have held the position, not just those with an historically favorable record during their terms.

A significant number of Fed members will make public addresses today. These include Philadelphia’s Patrick Harker, Boston’s Susan Collins, Richmond’s Tom Barkin, Kansas City’s Jeffrey Schmid and Fed Governor Michelle Bowman. These speeches will no doubt be focused on the Fed’s plans for cutting interest rates in 2025. 

Yesterday’s release of the minutes from the December 17-18 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting revealed no new real surprises, though we did note an increase in concern regarding how the incoming Trump administration’s policies may augment the trajectory the economy has been on over the past four years. These include tariffs on foreign imports increasing prices of goods here in the U.S. and deporting a high number of immigrants, which threatens to gut the domestic labor force, especially on the low-income side.

We have seen all but one of the Jobs Week reports come out so far — JOLTS data Tuesday, ADP ADP private-sector payrolls and Weekly Jobless Claims yesterday — but the big one is the Employment Situation report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), out Friday before the opening bell. Expectations are for 155K jobs to have been filled in December, with an Unemployment Rate holding steady at +4.2%.

See more : Britons have ‘lowest appetite’ for stock market investing in the G7

Beyond this, we’ll get a glimpse at Hourly Wages — expected to come down a bit to +0.3%, with year-over-year wages remaining at +4.0%. As we saw from the ADP numbers Wednesday, which came up short of expected private-sector job fills, it is cyclical industries like Education and Healthcare leading the labor market currently, not secular areas like Leisure and Hospitality, which dominated job growth in the years directly following the Covid pandemic.

The reason Jobs Week is so key is that it holds in its hands nearly half the dual mandate the Fed has when considering monetary policy. Going back to the FOMC minutes, inflation levels have of late been holding and not falling precipitously; while it’s good we’re not seeing a hard landing in the economy, after 100 basis points in cuts there does appear to be a consensus to pause further cuts at this time. Rapidly decreasing labor force numbers over time would very likely change the Fed’s equation.

Questions or comments about this article and/or author? Click here>>

Story Continues