Unemployment Friday’s report was disappointing. A net gain of 120,000 jobs with no prior month upward revisions is bringing back the idea of a mid-year slowdown, much as we saw the last two years. Bonds reacted very favorably, figuring the…
The Economy The economy continues to improve, if slowly. 243,000 new jobs were created last month, continuing the positive trend. Investors are showing a fairly significant increase in confidence, enough to push U.S. stocks within a couple of percent of…
Last Friday’s unemployment report was stronger than expected. 200,000 new jobs were created last month, and the overall unemployment rate declined to 8.5%. While that figure omits the people that have left the labor force we are clearly moving in…
The Federal Reserve met Tuesday and decided not to do anything. They were probably influenced by a slightly better employment report last week, but more than anything else they know that they basically have one bullet left in the chamber…
Economically, not all that much happened in October. On September 30th the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) said that we were headed for recession based on their leading indicators.[i] Those indicators barely changed at all over the next four weeks,…