Credit Writedowns

While job losses may be the norm for the next few months, I have actually been somewhat encouraged by data out of the US. That was the macro takeaway from my last piece. The problem is and has always been the pandemic, particularly for the…

In mid-December, when I was pegging market and economic trends, I said "Don't be surprised if we see job losses in future US jobs reports in the new year." And with both the ADP Wednesday and the US Labor Department data today confirming…

I know you want me to talk about how angry Trump supporters stormed the Capitol yesterday just five miles from where I live. But actually, let's leave that as a tangential topic and use today to marry the first two posts of 2021 that I…

The numbers coming out of the US today from ADP show the negative impact that coronavirus-related economic rollbacks have had on employment. The data processing firm said the US lost 123,000 jobs in December, where expectations had been for…

Happy New Year, everyone. I am going to leg into this new year slowly with a thought piece - no charts, no quotes, no numbers. I had thought about updating you last week when the US claims numbers came in. But I think having a couple weeks'…

For the second week in a row the raw jobless claims data have fallen, as has the uptick in the rate of increase in Covid-19 infections and death. Meanwhile, some 2.4 million people have been vaccinated worldwide, a Brexit negotiation seems…

In today's piece, I want to focus only on what's been happening rather than making any conjectures about what's likely to happen. Sometimes, it pays just to take stock of where we are because that can help discern where we're headed. So,…

It may seem a bit odd for me to talk about why someone might buy shares on a day when retail sales in the US were down 1.1%. But that's what's been on my mind all morning. I think the genesis of it is a conversation I had with Jay Pelosky…

So it turns out the dip in initial jobless claims last week was just an artifact of the Thanksgiving holiday. This week we played catch up and then some. The question now is where we go from here. Some thoughts on that below Big Head Ed…

The report on the US Employment Situation for November 2020 was released today. And the headline job growth number was poor, a miss of over 200,000 jobs. But as I write this, markets are mostly of a bullish mindset, looking through this…