Umm….Holy excrement?<\/p>\n
The payroll firm ADP Employer Services just released its report as to job losses in December, 693,000 jobs lost…..In one month<\/a>…..The ironically named Challenger, Gray & Christmas is also saying that layoffs reached a 5 year high in 2008.<\/p>\n The BLS will release its numbers on Friday, but I rather expect them to hew pretty closely to ADP’s numbers, particularly since ADP has been working to make its survey match the government numbers<\/a>.<\/p>\n It’s no wonder that late loan payments are higher than at any point since 1980<\/a>, there are a lot of people out of work.<\/p>\n In retail, we saw U.S. retail sales fell 0.8% YOY in the week following Christmas<\/a>, and mall vacancies are at a 10 year high<\/a>, rising from 6.6% to 7.1%, the highest quarterly jump ever recorded, and the highest vacancy rate ever recorded.<\/p>\n We are also seeing mortgage applications down for the first time in 4 weeks<\/a>, though that could people waiting for the Federal Reserve’s purchase of mortgage backed securities to drive rates lower.<\/p>\n We are seeing similarly grim economic data in Europe too<\/a>.<\/p>\n About the only bright news is that GM is saying that it does not expect to need more in the way of loans<\/a>…After $13.4 billion in tax dollars to GM and $6 Billion to GMAC, I would certainly hope so.<\/p>\n The jobs number drove the dollar down<\/a>, and traders are starting to go long on the Canadian dollar<\/a>, which implies that they expect commodities, oil and timber come to mind for Canada, to start going up again.<\/p>\n That being said, expectations were not met today, with oil falling by 12%<\/a> on reports of large inventories…..They are literally running out of tanks to store the stuff.<\/p>\n