After all kinds of interesting news this morning, which I will get to in a minute, the most impressive thing I saw were photos of the eruption of Mt Etna blowing its top off. Now that is exciting!
The equity market is off, the Dow down 28 and the SPX down 2.90, as most of the major indexes are also down. Oil is down, trading at 91.78, Gold down at 1389.5 and Silver down at 29.68. The 10 year note is down a few ticks, at 3.38% and the long Bond is down small at 4.55%. The big move is in the Euro, up 200 bips at 1.33, while the dollar sinks lower at 79.44.
The headline news this morning is the initial unemployment claims, printing at 445,000 on expectations of 410,000, and last weeks 409,000. The rest of the story is that Non-Seasonally adjusted claims came in at 770,413, 191,000 higher than the NSA number from last week. It must be due to that darn snow storm!
I have long wondered how the Government determined how many were unemployed, and for how long, and I have seen it reported twice in the past week that they basically count the number of checks written. They know how many people are getting checks on each of the State programs, and how many are funded by the supplement Fed programs. Then, when the checks stop being written, the individual is no longer counted as unemployed. In fact, he is no longer counted as being part of the work force.
One of the most misunderstood statistics of this structural employment problem is the shrinking of the work force as a percent of the population. While the population grows, introducing approximately 125,000 to 150,000 new potential workers to the job market each month, our government statistics tell us that the percent of the civilian work force has shrunk from over 66% of population to under 63% The only answer is similar to the treatment of the unemployed whose UE benefits have stopped being delivered. They are merely no longer counted.
No change in our Momentum Change indicators this morning..
Best To Your Trading!
Bill
No comments:
Post a Comment