3 Things to Watch in Friday's December Employment Report

The December jobs report is released on Friday, January 8th and economists expect non-farm payrolls to rise by 200,000. ‘The forecast strikes me as a reasonable baseline going into the number,’ said Steven Friedman, senior investment strategist at BNP Paribas Investment Partners, based in New York. ‘It’s a little bit soft compared to the pace of jobs growth that we’ve had over the past 12 months - 200,000 is still a very good number.’ The economy created 211,000 jobs in November 2015, a number strong enough that gave the Federal Reserve the go ahead to hike interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade back on Dec. 16. That said, Friedman will be keeping an eye out for revisions to the prior month’s reports. ‘The backward revisions have been a key focus of the market in recent months,’ he said. ‘Assuming those revisions are reasonable in the order of 20,000 or 30,000 plus or minus – it shouldn’t have that much of an impact on the outlook.’ TheStreet’s Scott Gamm has details from Wall Street.