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Initial Jobless Claims Continue Slide, PPI Below Expectations, Housing Start Small Beat
The onslaught of 'favorable' jobs numbers continues with the latest initial claims printing at 348K, down from an upward revised 361K, on expectations of a rise to 365K. This was the lowest number since March 2008. As a reminder, the abnormally warm January and February weather as discussed previously by David Rosenberg is a key reason in the ongoing favorable impression of the economy that this data skew creates. Granted the self-delusion of employers is just as palpable as that of market participants: claims went from sub 400K in the days before Lehman to nearly 600K in the weeks after. Continuing claims printed at 3.426MM down from 3.526MM, on expectations of 3.495K. Those seeing the 99-week expire increased as 23K people dropped out of EUCs and Extended Claims. Expect to see this "favorable" trend reverse within weeks, as the groundwork for more easing has to be set (more on that shortly). Elsewhere, the headline PPI came below expectations of 0.4%, printing at 0.1%, up from -0.1% previously, while Core PPI, paradoxically, beat this time, rising from 0.3% to 0.4%, on consensus of a decline to 0.2%. Finally Housing Starts was a meaningless and noisy 699K on expectations of 675K, where it has been crawling along the bottom for years. Permits Missed Expectations of 680K coming at 676K.
Adding inventory at rock bottom:
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On a long enough timeline, the number of initial claims during an election year drops to zero...
...bitchez!
The veracity of the PPI ?
"How many fingers, Winston ?"
Oh Yes He Did!
Under 8% by August 2012, and he wins with 48% of the vote.
~SB
Thank goodness. And here I thought things were getting worserer. At least it is just me.
B Krasting said all US indicators were on green in 2012...
700,000 houses we don't need. Now THAT is efficient use of capital!
If you want to put a nail in the coffin each new home should come with an $xxxx for school infrastructure since more houses = more students.
On the employment front Eric Bolling was a joke this morning on Fox NEws. I thought this guy had credibility...but no.
"Great numbers...indicates economy is showing some life...showing some growth..."
On what underwear on your head wearing households of morons planet of Supreme Commander Golgo do you live on Eric?
For some reason still unknown to me, I happened to be watching The Five last night. They were arguing about debt and Fatass Commie Bob Beckel stated the US is not approaching insolvency and debt doesn't matter because US is having no trouble selling bonds. Not one of the mental midgets at that table mentioned Ben Shalom Bernanke.
They are all idiots and tools. Judge Napolitano was the last bastion of sanity, and now they've gotten rid of him for shining too much light on the Statists. Fuck the MSM.
US bond market = world wide bond market. *Poof*
Some of it is not their fault. The economic education in America is atrocious. In my grad class the book only has Keynesian aggregate demand. If these people do not look outside the main stream educational system they simply do not know what they do not know.
Most of the people on this board have read Mises, Rothbard, Paul, and others and understand Austrian economics to some degree. These people have not.
PS for my students I throw in the Austrian and give them access to Austrian e-books and web sites.
A few links you probably already have, but just in case:
https://mises.org/Books/humanaction.pdf
https://mises.org/books/humanactionstudy.pdf
https://mises.org/books/lessons_for_the_young_economist_murphy.pdf
Silver and gold get slammed before jobless claims. Hmmm. When have I seen this before...
I wonder if they'll manage to stop everyone out @1700.
You can't stop out physical.
You can put it on sale though. Thanks guys!
Prices go up = suckers go to coin store and SELL their PMs.
Prices go down = I go to coin store and BUY their PMs.
productivity is down.. companies have to hire.. for now.. until demand collapses again. hiring workers will cut into profit margins I think.
green shoots.
Yes we can, kick that can!
Meanwhile:
Shadow inventory BITCHEZ!
Yeah, well look at the positive side..
The warmer weather makes being homeless more comfortable.
Yeah, I neglected that side of it.
I'm sure the swing voters in Illinois and Indiana will take yet another downswing in their home prices and an increase in Obamavilles in their vicinity into consideration as they cast their ballots for Maobama a second time.
So is it safe to say Obama has the homeless vote?
What is the Rebpublicans odds of gaining ground with this important sector of Voters?
"increase in... Soetoro-villes in their vicinity into consideration as they cast their ballots for... Obama Bin Lyin' a second time."
There... fixed it for you...
Brought to you by:
CREEP-Committee to RE-Elect the POS
All I can say is that the PM investors are among the unluckiest guys on the planet.
They are continually gamed and toyed with by the Cartel, TPTB, naked short sellers, and panicked speculators.
None of these problems exist in the U.S. Treasury market, or in dividend-paying ETF's like DVV.
What about the LA gas market? How unlucky are monster truck driving, cheeseburger eating momo gashogs? LOL...
Those tits are fake.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Hmm could fake boobs be considered as a miss-allocation of capital?
No... market innovation...
Even the weather gods want Obama re-elected given the potential GOP candidates.
Conversely the weather gods conspiring against QE3.
Haven’t you people picked up on the oil patter yet? When the Middle East is pissed about war xyz they figure out a way to jack up oil prices to send that special greeting to the American political party in power, saying as best they can, FUCK YOU AMERICAN Zionist BASTARD!!!
The Iranian bull shit is not some nut jobs being nut jobs. It’s a contrived “confrontation” that will jack up oil prices and possibly put the last nail or two into the global Ponzi scheme.
Jimmy Carter started the tradition.
'Who you calling 'YOU PEOPLE'?"
Al Sharpton
</SARC>
Economy's great, people getting jobs and mmmm mmmm.... this steak taste sooo good!
How are the noodles?
They're great in Italy, also an awesome economy!
"this steak taste sooo good!"
The CPI methodology says you substituted hamburger for steak...
How's that working out for you?
The steak's real, cause the mind is telling me it's real, just like all the numbers are telling us how great the economy is trucking along. Then you see the black cat deja vu and the house of cards comes tumbling down on wall street once again.
All bullish!
Go chairsatan!
I always thought the idea of economic growth on a year to year basis lasting forever was a total bullshit idea. Ha. Yeah right. Then you have WallStreet "expectations" that are basically one huge short circuit loop as they are helping to crash the economy by being forced to meet ever increasing numbers and they have nothing left to cut except employees.
This model=disaster in the end. The rich made a fast buck, the rest of us got screwed.
I beleive the flaw is that they think the results of today inpact hiring tomorrow. There is a one year lag in corporate performance and employment. The super near-sighted analysts cannot see past yesterday's number of Iphones sold to see a bigger picture or longer term corelations. The corelations are there if you look.
Companies reporting higher year over year corporate profts have slipped from 71% last summer to 65% today. And the margin of increase has dropped from 30% to less than 8%. So why they keep saying the economy is getting stronger, The data says something else.
within the next three prints we will be at pre-recession levels, and the unemployment rate will be sub-8, may as well trade accordingly along with the BS until 2013, none of the 2012 numbers will be allowed to be recessionary.
Market manipulation of the PMs in the Fed's "War Room" is now on a nano second, 24/7 basis ! Monedas 2012 "BUY THE LIE !"....monedas
For at least 3 years weekly initial jobless claims average is probably 400k. 3yr*52weeks*400k=62 mln people. That's insane.
Sounds like someone hasn't drank the Kool Aid
"blue skies, smiling at me
nothing but blue skies...."
Mega home builders = employment for illegals =amnesty= millions added to the ponzi=the new middle class
Lay-offs have slowed because many companies have reached the limits of functioning. If they lay off any more people they can't do the basic things required to stay in business. They will have to shed locations, give up customers who can't be serviced or close the doors.
Sort of a dead cat bounce. the last hiring to increase inventories...but alas, there is no market for these goods. final breath...
classified led by job adds have fallen 70% since 2000..now how do we equate this with this sudden uptik in jobs - we can't.
http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/newspapers-essay/data-page-6/
PS - probably time to start removing liquidity since the numbers are all improving. Don't hear much about the "transitory" nature of these prints. All TPTB could talk about during the last uptick was how "transitory" it was. Well, if they knew that, then why wait to start removing accomodations, wouldn't want inflation to ruin the election party! Better stay ahead of the curve, and start some hawkish rhetoric, I for one am a very concerned citizen!
My friends inside PepsiCo shared this with me:
They setup an entire wing of conference rooms and are int the process of laying off hundreds of folks in the Plano location. Three senior executives in the financial department at Frito Lay are gone.
A new rule has been instituted by Indra: no domestic (read that as US) contractors shall be hired for more than 6-12 months without a 6 month bench rotation. Instead any long-term work shall be handled by Wipro and Cognizant. This means offshoring and outsourcing to India is not slowing but accelerating. Those 8700 positions being eliminated are just the tip of the iceberg. PepsiCo employs a large number of temporary workers and contractors (80% of their IT staff) and those positions are being eliminated in droves.
The corporate strip mining of American society will continue until further notice.
That is all.
Time to stop drinking pepsi, healthcare costs will go down too.
But the president was just on TV touting the fact that we're now INSOURCING. You must be lying here.
TeeVee told me we're doing better and the President said we're insourcing.
Why would he lie? I mean, afterall - Pepsico changed their logo to match up with Mr. Obama's. I mean, they couldn't be in this thing together because I know the president is for me, the little guy, not big corporations. Right?
Thanks for this info, by the way!
just got new info. infosys not wipro.
LIE
Small beat on housing indeed. STILL IN THE PENALTY BOX! And IJC are showing steady improvement, but employment to population ratio still stinks.
http://confoundedinterest.wordpress.com/
Even in a strong economy(this is not), the best numbers are 300k a week.
This is about as good as it gets. So they need to quit looking at this indicator and look at the numbers of people ACTUALLY working in the private sector.
Year over year profit improvement has been declining for the last 6 quarters. This economic cycle has reached it high point. $4 gasoline will be the end of any over confidence anyone has.
One year from now we will be shedding private sector jobs yet again. Companies do not hire in a declining profit cycle.
The point is bernanke bucks are making their way into the economy. You're seeing it in housing starts, sales, employment and energy prices. The "green" economy is in an incredible bubble, as is capex on nat gas fracking. All while real incomes get destroyed. How they justify the continued low rates into 2014 is beyond me, let alone more asset purchases. They sparked a recovery, they should be raising rates now. And if they don't, the market to the detriment of the bond market will do it for them.
I think they actually let the equity markets blow off steam here to keep interest rates low.
Also a possible reason for the slide would be that these newly "marginal" employees with marginal or aging skills have already hit unemployment once in the last couple years and now must play either the underemployed game long enough to hit it again or SS disability....thus the pool for potential new unemployed is shrinking vs. the economy getting much better...
Wholesale gasoline is up more than 60 cents per gallon from it's recent and very temporary lows, and that decline in gasoline had been the only thing allowing them to claim inflation was under control. Here we have seen gas go up 30 cents in the last two weeks and it will rise another 35-45 cents in the coming few weeks wiping out the brief relief felt at the pumps. Yesterday I filled up for $3.699 per gallon (premium). I predict it will be over $4 by March 7th. And food prices that had been driven so high by the price of fuel (that was the excuse they used anyway) never did drop when fuel dropped, I expect grocery prices to resume their skyrocket trajectory because it would be such a shame to waste a crisis. Even the spun data from the BLS says prices rose 0.7% in December and 0.4% in January, that is an annualized 6.6%, that is NOT a good number. Just because it is less than 10% don't make it good, and real price increases are probably in excess of 10%, yet so many items more than doubled in the last year, it is hard not to call it hyperinflation when food items double in a year.
I came across this handy database. You can plug in any region or area by zip code and get 12 month longitudinal data for foreclosure filings (percentage that have received notice of devault vs. notice of trustees sale), foreclosure outcomes (cancellations, back to bank or sold to third party), foreclosure inventories (the number and percentage in preforclosure, scheduled for sale or bank-owned and several other metrics.
http://www.foreclosureradar.com/
Could someone please remind me what the benefits are of competing in a global economy? Something about productive use of capital...
It is nice to see that we are gaining ground in the creation of call center jobs - and Masterlock! Don't forget the all important personal security device market. That should get things moving again.
We'll see unemployment turn around just in time for the election as they eliminate a few hundred thousand more from the labor force. That, combined with all the freebies the government's handing out these days, and widespread vote fraud will make the Marxist-in-Chief very difficult to beat. I read an interesting theory yeasterday that says that the left are considering an open run under the socialist banner because for the first time in history a majority of Americans receive some kind of government assistance and will not be able to vote against their pocketbook.