Economic guru Jeremy Siegel warns that last week's stock sell-off could flourish into a full-blown 10 percent correction.
"When I saw at 8:30 that wage [increase] year over year hitting a nine-year high, I said: 'Wow, we're probably going to get four interest rates hikes,'" the University of Pennsylvania finance professor told CNBC.
The Wharton Business School professor cited Friday's jobs report as the spark in the Dow Jones industrial average's nearly 666-point drop on Friday.
"We overdid it at the end of last year and the beginning of this year. I mean, I think we almost double-counted the effect of the corporate tax cut, which is very, very positive," Siegel said.
"But you were going up far more than what actually earnings were going to rise as a result of the tax cut," he told CNBC.
"Will this turn into a correction, 10 percent? It could."
For his part, economic guru Larry Kudlow said investors need to keep an eye on the bond market’s reaction to economic data such as wage growth. Employment surged in January and wages rose the most in more than 8-1/2 years, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed on Friday.
The report led investors to expect that inflation will push higher this year as the labor market hits full employment.
Average hourly earnings rose 2.9 percent from a year earlier, the biggest increase since June 2009, compared with a 2.7 percent gain in December. But the average workweek fell to 34.3 hours, the shortest in four months, from 34.5 hours in December.
“The economy is now moving at a much higher growth trajectory, as a consequence principally of the tax reform bill which has been embraced by corporations faster than almost anybody thought possible, including me,” Kudlow said on CNBC. “That means interest rates have to adjust. The Fed may be a little stingier, we’ll see.”
Kudlow was among the economists who advised Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. Trump ran on a pro-business platform of cutting taxes and regulation while spending $1 trillion on infrastructure like roads and bridges. In December, Trump approved a sweeping tax reform bill that cut corporate tax rates and urged companies to transfer trillions of dollars held overseas back to the U.S.
For his part, Trump went to Twitter to tout the jobs data and economy.
"Great jobs numbers and finally, after many years, rising wages- and nobody even talks about them. Only Russia, Russia, Russia, despite the fact that, after a year of looking, there is No Collusion!" he tweeted Friday.
(Newsmax wire services contributed to this report).
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