Reassuring US job growth provides a small comfort blanket for traders fretting over tariffs

We have no clue how much pain tariffs, retaliatory tariffs, and counter-retaliatory tariffs are going to inflict on the US economy going forward.

But one thing we have learned is that the American labor market wasn’t completely falling apart ahead of the imposition of reciprocal tariffs. US nonfarm payrolls grew by 228,000 in March, massively exceeding economists’ expectations for 140,000. It wasn’t an unambiguously positive report, though, as the unemployment rate inched up to 4.2%.

The SPDR S&P 500 Trust caught a bit of a bid following this release, and is trading in tandem with two-year US Treasury yields. Both are still lower on the session, but well off their lows of the day. The reassuring jobs data isn’t moving too much for markets, probably a signal of how little the past matters in light of the upheaval in global cross-border commerce.