Business

Authored by Chris Hamilton via Econimica blog,

March was a month of giving back: after a very strong, if downward revised start to the year, with both January and February payrolls revised lower by a total of 38,000 jobs, March saw the worst job gains since May 2016, with only 98,000 jobs added. While many have claimed it was the weather's fault, the BLS reported that 164K people said they were unable to work in March due to poor weather conditions. This was just fractionally more than the 143K long-term average.

This is where the job gains, and losses, were:

After initially tumbling in the aftermath of the U.S. missile attack on Syria which jolted financial markets, boosting haven assets and temporarily shifting investor focus from today's jobs data , S&P futures have managed to recoup all losses (the Nikkei closed up 0.4% after sliding earlier in the session), with Europe also just fractionally lower and climbing fast.

Here is the consensus for the key numbers the BLS will report at 8:30am ET on Friday morning

Authored by Thorstein Polleit via The Mises Institute,

The European Central Bank (ECB) pushed its deposit rate to minus 0.4 percent in April 2016: Since then, euro area banks must pay 0.4 percent per annum on their excess reserves held at ECB accounts. This, in turn, has far-reaching consequences. To start with, banks seek to evade this "penalty rate," especially by buying government bonds.