Monday Thoughts – What About the Jobs?

4.6.09

I was just listening to the Jim Rogers video (again) that I have on my front page. From time to time, you need to listen to wisdom to keep your head steady so this was a bit of a refresher.

Listening to Jim say “why should healthy economies bail out the US?” And that they should “take care of themselves” is very good advice for those countries and counters what our government is trying to do in encouraging the EU, etc to spend and stimulate the global economy back up to growth (or said better, back to its fantasy/inflated level of 2-3 years ago). There is a good chance that these countries will wisely refuse our requests asking them to throw their savings at our problems – as Rogers asks – “why should they bail out a bunch of 29 year old investment bankers?”

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS

The real coming problem is jobs – in the “that’s always funny about” department, the market rose last week after headlines stating that job losses were not “as bad” as expected cam across the wires. This was AFTER January figures were revised DOWNWARD. You can surely bet that the 650k or so jobs lost last month will be revised downward also. I’m looking for  a revision to 800,000 and still expecting (unfortunately) to hit that 1 million mark this year, though some firms might have hired last month as productions levels bounced off ZERO from the 4th quarter 2008 to first  quarter of 2009 (but probably not). I will say though, that including those workers who have given up and part-timers who want to work full time, we are likely already close to, or  OVER 1 million per month going forward. Add in the restless unemployed teens that will help cause our crime rate to rise as discussed in an article last year, and we will have lots of interesting workforce topics to discuss.

If All the Jobs are Lost, Why is the Market Still Rising?

The stock market sometimes tries to look ahead and go up, but I have a feeling this will turn over as analysts see that the fundamentals are not so strong, job losses are growing, and economic underlying fundamentals are weakening. See this dire prediction of bond defaults from Bloomberg:

Bloomberg Bond Defaults to Rise

It’s not pretty out there and as it always is, navigating is difficult work.

Chris Grande