U.S. Probes Possible Leak of Jobs Report

The Labor Department and market regulators said they were looking into a possible leak of March employment data because of significant moves in financial markets just before Friday’s official release of the report.

Some analysts were convinced that the surprisingly robust jobs report was leaked before its official 8:30 a.m. EST embargo, causing unusually large price movements in markets about two minutes before the scheduled release time.

Bond, currency and stock futures markets all showed moves greater than the usual volatility often seen before the release of closely watched economic data, analysts said.

“You can see the price action. It smells like a leak and walks like a leak. It happened two minutes before the release,” said Monica Fan, a currency strategist at Royal Bank of Canada.

“It started in the fixed income market and then spilled over into [foreign exchange]. Not just one or two trades. The whole market was involved,” said one senior dealer at a major European bank in New York.

Given the magnitude of the markets’ moves Friday, anyone trading early could have reaped substantial benefit.

A Labor spokesman said the department was reviewing the case. Spokesmen for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said the agencies were reviewing market activity around the time of the release.

Several groups get an early look at the payrolls data. Bureau of Labor Statistics officials have parts of the report for several days before it is released, but security at the agency is tight.

Reuters was briefly a suspect after one of its stories was sent to media clients with an 8:28 a.m. timestamp.

But company officials said a technical glitch had produced an incorrect stamp and that Reuters did not break the embargo.