{"id":191588,"date":"2009-07-24T05:55:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-24T10:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/07\/24\/economics-update-one-day-late\/"},"modified":"2009-07-24T05:55:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-24T10:55:00","slug":"economics-update-one-day-late","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/07\/24\/economics-update-one-day-late\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update, One Day Late"},"content":{"rendered":"

Normally, I don’t comment on stock market swings, but the Dow closing above 9000 for the first time since January allows me to invoke this Dragonball Z<\/span> meme, sorry.*<\/sup><\/div>\n

Yes, I know that this should have been done yesterday, but once I got all the links together, we had heavy thunder storms, and so I shut down for the evening.<\/p>\n

In any case, yesterday was unemployment claims Thursday, and new claims are up by 30K to 554K<\/a>, but note that these numbers are all seasonally adjusted<\/span><\/span>, which means that they really are not particularly valid, since the July shutdowns of GM and Chrysler happened in the spring of this year, so for this week, and to a lesser degree next week, we are flying blind on these statistics.<\/p>\n

That being said, I think that the numbers on continuing claims are still valid, or at least more valid, and those numbers fell 88K to 6.225 million.<\/p>\n

In any case, 550,000 weekly new unemployment claims, or for that matter anything over 400,000 new claims, is a grim picture, and so we are still well within the “grimness event horizon.”<\/p>\n

I would also note that downward pressure on the continuing claims numbers is coming from people who are exhausting their unemployment benefits, and as Peter Boockvar at The Big Picture notes<\/a>, the number of people on emergency<\/span> unemployment benefits, which cut in after<\/span> 26 weeks, are way up, but they are not<\/span> counted in the continuing claims numbers.<\/p>\n

So, I would not put a whole bunch of credence in the normally reported unemployment numbers until probably the August 7 numbers.<\/p>\n

In terms of more general economic news, we have credit card charge offs rising again in June<\/a>, hotel revenues down and vacancies up<\/a>, and on a conference call, the CEO of UPS noted that he is not seeing any signs of recovery in his shipping business<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the plus side, Canadian consumer confidence rose in July<\/a>, and there was a surprise jump in U.K. retail sales<\/a>, largely on increased purchases of clothing, which means that the Brits are poor, but not poorly dressed.<\/p>\n

In real estate, existing home sales rose in June<\/a>, but it should be noted that 1<\/sup>\/3<\/sub> of these are distressed sales, either foreclosures or short sales, and it should also be noted that prices are still falling off a cliff<\/a>, down 15.4% year over year.<\/p>\n

Mortgage rates are marginally lower<\/a>, probably in reaction to Bernanke’s testimony before the Congress.<\/p>\n

In the area of news that sounds important, but that I cannot for the life of me suss out what it means, it appears that Swiss banks are running out of vault space for gold bullion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Finally, oil rose<\/a> and the dollar fell<\/a> yesterday.<\/p>\n

*<\/sup>OK, I’m really <\/span>not<\/span> sorry, not one little bit.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Normally, I don’t comment on stock market swings, but the Dow closing above 9000 for the first time since January allows me to invoke this Dragonball Z meme, sorry.* Yes, I know that this should have been done yesterday, but once I got all the links together, we had heavy thunder storms, and so I …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1080,973,975,1135,1004,1088,1089],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currency","category-economy","category-employment","category-energy","category-finance","category-real-estate","category-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191588"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191588\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}