2012

By Sober Look Continuing with the recent theme of the US labor markets, consider the chart below. It's the total US employees on nonfarm payrolls going back to the mid 60s. We've heard numerous discussions about how the current payrolls…

No huge commentary today. But what struck me about the links in today's edition was how many were related to the loss of jobs and income both in the US and Europe. Rick Bookstaber's post about the Great Labor Reset has me thinking about how…

By Rick Bookstaber In a  recent post I discussed the potential for long-term, structural unemployment, the possibility that some of what we are seeing in the unemployment picture will not be resolved by an economic upturn. The focus of the…

Last week I promised to provide a little more insight into what the ECB is doing with its OMT program and what this should mean for the euro, economic growth, and European sovereign bond markets. This weekly post is dedicated to that theme.…

By Marc Chandler The US dollar is consolidating last week's losses in largely uneventful activity.  In fact, consolidation is the general theme in the broader capital markets as well.   Equity markets are narrowly mixed, with the MSCI Asia…

By Sober Look Friday's employment figures were terrible across the board, although some have naively interpreted the decline in the headline unemployment rate (from 8.3% to 8.1%) as positive news. Unfortunately there is nothing positive…

By Sober Look The Citi Economic Surprise index was fairly accurate in pointing to a US slowdown in the first half of 2012. One therefore should not dismiss the recent reversal in the indicator's trend. The index just went into the positive…

The weekly will be a more in depth look on the ECB but here's today's daily first. I will be on Headline with Howard Green on Monday at 1230 to talk about all the headlines of the day. I just want to focus on one aspect of the euro crisis…

By Marc Chandler The US employment data is an important disappointment, especially coming on the heels of yesterday's ADP and service ISM reports that had lifted expectations. The private sector created a net 103k jobs, well below the 143k…

Amazon's announcement yesterday was a very big deal. Here's my daily today. It's on Amazon.  I am doing this in two parts with tech articles in this one because I meant to post this part yesterday but I wasn't able to post after 2PM. The…