As the market heads into the new week, the attention is still very much on Friday’s jobs report showing an unexpected 528,000 increase in nonfarm payrolls. “It was quite a surprise to me,” said Dennis Gartman, the retired publisher of the Gartman letter and now the chairman of the University of Akron’s endowment and investment committee, in an interview with Bloomberg Radio.
He said the jobs numbers show there’s no Fed pivot in sight. Gartman said he expects not just a 75 basis point rate hike in September, but another 75 point hike in November and possibly a half-point increase in December. Stocks, however, moved off their lowest level of the session after the report was released, with the Dow industrials
DJIA,
+0.23%
actually ending in positive territory, while the S&P 500 posted just a 0.2% decline. “I must admit that the rally has been a little more exuberant than I had thought. I was a little surprised by the response on Friday. Maybe it’s just a rally in a bear market, which I think is what it is, but I have to admit I have been somewhat taken aback by the fact the market has remained as strong as it has, given the fact that the yield curve is inverted and will continue to invert even more,” he said. He added he’s now “less amenable” to his previous prediction that the stock market would be down another 20% by the end of the year. Gartman had advised the Akron endowment to take 12% of the portfolio out of equities at the end of December, and then recommended ta …