Jobs Report Negative
Another poor jobs report came out today that put the number of jobless Americans at the highest in 14 years at the current rate of 6.5%. This is bad news all around and will inevitably affect consumer confidence, total spending, and the housing and finance market that is dealing with large amounts of people who are already in a position that they can’t make payments.
It also must be noted that many of the jobs lost are in the service industry and retail. Things like Financial services and mortgage banks are cutting huge numbers of jobs to bring the black back to the bottom lines. A shrinking workforce helps individual companies, but as a whole unemployment stifles economies before anything else.
It is important to remember that the market is more interested in beating expectations than anything. For the most part, investors want to see something outperform than to see it perform well all around. Unfortunately this time the expectations were not as bad as the numbers were, a full 240,000 jobs lost when expectations were much lower.
On this Friday trading day we should be happy to see a resilient market even with negative news like this. Generally Friday’s are led by selling, especially in volatile markets because no trader wants to hold exposure during times when they can’t sell. (The weekends)
