Jobs day is feeling left out

it's the overall noise, and the pivot to stressing about inflation

“Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.” – George Santayana ||

Hi all, and HAPPY FRIDAY!! I hope you’re all doing well.

A personal note: the key goal of this newsletter is to filter out the always-present noise and focus on what matters for the spreading intersection of the crypto and macro landscapes. To do that, I‘m constantly asking myself: “what was the most important development over the past day/week/month?”. With this, I generally manage to extract a short list of key trends and changes to keep an eye on. Only, lordy, either the noise is much louder this year, or the pace of meaningful change has gone turbo.

This is a roundabout way of saying 1) the backlog of topics I want to get to is growing longer by the day, and 2) I’m really glad it’s the weekend. 😊

Coming up next week (hopefully, unless these get bumped!): an update on CBDC activity (it’s getting political), a review of what we were obsessed with a year ago, some barriers to tokenization’s potential, and the flurry of activity on crypto ETF listings. Plus, Fed Chair Powell testifies, we get the January CPI, and I’m pretty sure the Trump team will continue to give us plenty to talk about.

Today, I look at the US jobs market – this is going out before the official January release, but I share the week’s data so far that shows a market more or less in balance for now.

(No audio today! Too many charts.)

IN THIS NEWSLETTER:

• Jobs day is feeling left out

• Employment in balance

• Clouds loom – again

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WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Jobs day is feeling left out

It’s indicative of the crescendo of noise around tariffs, government spending, banking hearings and regulatory initiatives that this week’s big economic data drop is being largely overlooked by crypto watchers. Normally, “jobs day” is a big deal, with markets working themselves into a froth of excitement all week.

But it’s here, and while it may be competing for significance amidst everything else going on, it’s still an important signal on Fed policy going forward.

I’m writing this before the news comes out, so my musings may end up being less relevant than I intend should we get a big surprise. But my aim is to set the stage for how things may be about to change, and what that means for crypto markets.

Employment in balance

Part of the fun buildup to “jobs day” is the steady release of relevant US employment data from other sources.