In our nonfarm payrolls preview, we quoted JPMorgan’s Market Intel desk which said that “for this print, the stronger the better”, which by implication means that a poor number would be bad. By that logic, the actual number couldn’t be any worse, because moments ago the BLS reported that in February, the US lost 92,000 jobs, a huge drop from the downward revised (of course) 126K in January, and the second worst print since 2020 (only October’s shock -140K was worse), and this time, the massive drop can’t be dismissed as a one-time drop in government payrolls. The number of private payrolls dropped by 86K, also a huge miss to estimates of a 60K increase.