In our jobs report preview we quoted JPM's Market Intel desk which said that today's August payrolls number will be a case of "good news is bad news", and sure enough futures are sliding and yields surging after moments ago the BLS reported that in August, the US added a whopping 162K jobs, up from an upward revised 21K (July is no longer negative -23K), and the second highest monthly increase of 2026 (only March was higher)...
... and printed not only above the median estimate of 50K but above the highest Wall Street estimate of 125K (from Pantheon). In fact, this was a a 4-sigma beat to expectations.
Understandably, today's blowout print was the biggest beat of estimates going back to March.
For once, revisions were quite favorable, with June numbers revised up by 11,000, from +20,000 to +31,000, and July revised up by 44,000, from -23,000 to +21,000. With these revisions, employment in June and July combined is 55,000 higher than previously reported.
Remarkably, unlike previous months w
