A surprise drop in July jobs figures sends futures higher as traders price out Federal Reserve tighteningThe US labor market handed Wall Street an unexpected gift on Thursday morning. June’s initial reading of 57,000 jobs added was revised down to just 20,000, suggesting the labor market had been cooling faster than official data had indicated. Economists sometimes describe this labor market dynamic as “slow hire, slow fire,” a state where companies are neither aggressively adding staff nor laying workers off in large numbers. July marked the first outright negative payroll reading in recent months, which means this report carries more weight than a simple miss would. Hiking into a labor market that just printed negative job growth requires a level of inflation urgency that the current data does not obviously support.