The employment report released last Friday was better than expected but the response by bulls and bears alike was exactly as expected. Both found things in the report to support their preconceived notions about the state of the economy. I do think the bulls had the better case on this particular report but there have been plenty of others recently [...]
It appears as if most reactions to today’s April 2022 payroll were quite positive, maybe enthusiastic when they should not have been. Though the Establishment Survey - the CES headline number most people pay attention to - gained 428,000 over March’s tally, it was the “other” one which crashed down like last week’s negative GDP thud.From the CES view, you [...]
Most people have the impression that these various payroll and employment reports just go into the raw data and count up the number of payrolls and how many Americans are employed. Perhaps the BLS taps the IRS database as fellow feds, or ADP as a private company in the same data business of employment just tallies how many payrolls it [...]
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche The new year got off to quite a bang last week. It was almost as if someone flipped a switch and investors/traders suddenly decided that all that stuff they believed last year was just so passe. Growth stocks? Nah, who wants [...]
The economic slowdown we've been writing about for months officially arrived last Friday in the form of a particularly weak employment report. The number of new jobs created last month - or at least the WAG the BLS makes at such things on a monthly basis - was a mere 235,000 or roughly a cool half-million less than expected by [...]
Jerome Powell delivered his long-anticipated speech at Jackson Hole last week. Well actually, I have no idea if he was actually in Jackson Hole since the speech was delivered electronically, another victim of the delta variant. The virus itself rated barely a mention in Mr. Powell's remarks and I think that is probably as it should be. There has been [...]
Remember "The New Normal"? Back in 2009, Bill Gross, the old bond king before Gundlach came along, penned a market commentary called "On the Course to a New Normal" which he said would be: "a period of time in which economies grow very slowly as opposed to growing like weeds, the way children do; in which profits are relatively static; [...]
They're out there panicking right now. I can feel it. They're out there. They're panicking. Look at them. - Eddie Murphy as Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places I thought of that scene the other day when a good friend in the investment business told me that investors today are panicking into the market rather than out as they were [...]
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. George Orwell, 1984 I have said many times and believe deeply that our job as investors is not to predict the future but merely to interpret the present as accurately as we can. I've also said and believe deeply that doing [...]
There's an old saying on Wall Street that one should "buy the rumor, sell the news", a pithy way to express the efficient market theorem. By the time an event arrives, whatever it may be, the market will have fully digested the news and incorporated it into current prices. And then the market will move on to anticipating the next [...]
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