What the November jobs report tells us

That is the opening bell on Wall Street. Getting the honor today, the president and chief investment officer of Harbor Capital to celebrate four of their ETFs. Taking a look live right now at the floor of the exchange. Numbers are relatively flat to start the day because it always sort of starts kind of flattish. But let's bring in Megan Leonhardt. She is a senior writer at Barron's. She joins me now to talk about this. Megan, good to see you. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. So we were having a conversation earlier with one of our correspondents about the jobs report. Let me get your take on what we saw this morning. Well, I think the data kind of shows that the Fed was likely warranted in its pause. We did see that payrolls held up, which was nice and a little bit higher than estimates even. But we did see that unemployment rate tick up, and it's been at the highest rate since 2021 at this point. So this is something worth watching very carefully, and it's one of the key stats that I think Fed officials, economists, and investors are really watching these days because it kind of gives you a pulse on both labor supply and demand. And we've had that curious balance happening for most of the year, but it seems like that's starting to fade. And this is something that I think Fed officials in particular are going to be watching very carefully as we go into January and the new year.

So let's talk about retail sales, which have pretty much remained unchanged for the month of October. What does the new data tell us about how people are going to spend this holiday season? It's interesting. The consensus was for a little bit higher than we actually saw. So they sort of held flat for October when it comes to retail sales. A lot of this was driven by autos. So it is one of those situations where once you start taking that out of the equation, the data looks a little bit better. And, of course, we did have a lot of that buying ahead of many of the potential tariffs earlier in the year. So this is something of a little bit of a rebound effect even happening now. It is interesting. We have seen a number of consumer reports saying that, while consumer finances are holding up, consumers are looking for deals and are being very careful with their dollars this holiday season. We, obviously, saw a decent Black Friday. So I'm not totally worried about those holiday sales, but it is something where we're starting to see consumers be very, very careful. This will be something to particularly watch in that first quarter because that's when we'll start to get those tax breaks, those tax refunds. And if we don't see sales start to pick up then, that could be an indication for what we're seeing in 2026 full year.

All right, Megan, always great to have you, my friend. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thanks so much.