Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq futures waver as jobs report beats estimates, unemployment rate rises

Investors were warned heading into the November jobs report that the numbers might be noisy following the 43-day government shutdown and the lagged effects of DOGE cuts.

“Everybody should assume there’s a pretty big margin of error here,” RSM chief economist Joe Brusuelas told Yahoo Finance, adding that investors are likely to see revisions in January, when the data returns to normal.

The government is catching up on its delayed and canceled economic reports after the government shutdown created a data fog. The mixed employment numbers released Tuesday underscored the distortions.

For instance, the November jobs report also included data on October payrolls, which declined by 105,000 during the month, after the October jobs report was canceled. The Bureau of Labor Statistics did not collect household survey data for that month.

Adding to the volatility were federal worker job cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which didn’t formally drop off the payrolls until the fall. As my colleague Jake Conley noted below, federal government employment sharply declined by 162,000 in October and by 6,000 in November.

This means that when the Federal Open Market Committee convenes again in January, it will have to contend with flawed data for at least another month.

“We’re going to need to be careful in assessing, particularly the household survey data,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last Wednesday after the FOMC cut interest rates. “We’re going to get data, but we’re going to have to look at it carefully and with a somewhat skeptical eye,” he added.

As of 9 a.m. ET, traders’ bets that the Federal Reserve would cut interest rates again in January remained unchanged at 24%, according to CME Group’s FedWatch tool.