The U.S. Department of Labor reported a fall from a revised 575,000 jobless claims don to a still very elevated 554,000 this past week. On the whole these numbers demonstrate that many jobs are being lost and that the December unemployment number will be very large when released early next month.

I am going to post a BBC article here that gives an anecdote about western Canada and how the boom in oil and commodities is causing economic problems there. Make of it what you will, but my bottom line is that Canada is neither immune from global pressures or from the commodities savaging. This type of thing will com to an end.

Just months ago, Rio Tinto was a behemoth swaggering from the huge run up in commodity prices. This is a company that had revenue of nearly $30 billion and net income of nearly $8 billion in 2007. It was worth over $160 billion by May as the commodities boom took shape.

They were everywhere: building projects in Saudi Arabia, resisting a takeover by BHP Billiton and operating across the globe. Most of that is history now, except for the debt.

After yesterdays melt-up on the Fed’s decision to go ZIRP and introduce quantitative and qualitative easing, things are a bit calmer today. Here’s what I have.

Enjoy.

Ed

Is this an unorderly decline for the dollar?

These last two days have been bad for the dollar. We are seeing heavy losses against the Swiss Franc, the Euro, the Australian Dollar, and The Japanese Yen.

It’s interesting to hear a chief executive of a major Wall Street firm speak openly and on the record about the economy. So, it’s refreshing to watch this video and see Jamie Dimon’s take on a number of economic issues ncluding house prices and infrastructure spending.

A few days ago, I showed you a video from a long session he did with Erin Burnett of CNBC. This is another segment of that session. On the whole, he sounds very reasonable. Take a look.

Jamie Dimon on the Economy

With Treasury securities at all time lows you get the feeling fundamentals is not the only thing driving the rally in U.S. government bonds. After all, the Fed has been lowering interest rates and showering the financial sector with money. So, I wanted to highlight a comment that I find fitting.

Morgan Stanley released a dismal earnings report one day after Goldman’s. Obviously this is shaping up to a be a very bad quarter for financial institutions. Morgan’s $2.2 billion loss was certainly less than Goldman’s but very large nevertheless. And it brought us to $1 trillion in losses by global financial institutions since the credit crisis began way back in February 2007 with HSBC’s subprime writedowns.

This video from the 1930s is a timeless piece of work, giving an explanation of what inflation and deflation are and how they work. (hat tip Tim Iacono)

hat tip jka on economics UK