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The Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report was released this morning, showing a slight increase in initial jobless claims to 558,000. Continuing claims came in at 6.2 million, down from 6.3 million the week before.  All of these figures are seasonally-adjusted.
On an unadjusted basis, claims were below 500K for the second week running.  In looking at [...]

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The Employment Situation Summary for July was released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), showing a 9.4% unemployment rate and 247,000 jobs lost in July.  These numbers were better than anticipated, with the unemployment rate actually falling from 9.5%.
In its release, the BLS emphasized the fact that employment figures are improving. While the [...]

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When the stimulus bill was being crafted, I wrote three posts lamenting the protectionist Buy American provision attached to the bill.

‘Buy American’ will translate into a 21st century Smoot-Hawley
The U.S. is exporting unemployment with ‘Buy America’
Canada is furious about U.S. protectonism

The last of these three demonstrated that the provision was needlessly creating lots of ill [...]

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The US Department of Labor released the employment last data point before tomorrow’s widely anticipated unemployment number comes out. The data showed jobless claims declining to 550,000 from 588,000 on a seasonally-adjusted basis. This puts the 4-week average at 555,250, the lowest average number since January. Meanwhile seasonally-adjusted continuing claims ticked up a notch to [...]

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Yesterday, I mentioned that the housing data, while generally positive (the first uptick nationally in 34 months), contained some negative news due to seasonality.
The crux of the problem lies in the strong tendency for house prices to increase in the spring and summer because that is when demand for housing is greatest. Add in [...]

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The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices for May 2009 were released today and the data showed a marked contrast to previous months. Fully 14 of 20 markets showed an increase in home prices in that month, making it the first time since July 2006 that the overall index has risen month-to-month. On a year-over-year basis, home [...]

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The Economist released its remarkably telling Big Mac Index this past weekend.  The index looks at the relative cost of Big Mac in various countries to gauge how over- or undervalued the currencies in those locales are.  Judging from this Index, there are some monster distortions in the currency markets right now.

The numbers marked [...]

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While Tim Geithner is out in the Middle East making the obligatory rounds, professing support for a strong U.S. dollar, investment strategists are wondering aloud whether a weak U.S. dollar is really what the U.S. government wants.  David Rosenberg put out the following note over at Gluskin, Sheff.
It is the second anniversary of the credit [...]

Don’t let government misdirect anger to Wall Street so that government gets a free ride. Government is responsible for the lack of criminal prosecutions, the coziness with big business and the dominance of special interests. We need to hold them accountable if anything is to change.

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Back in the 1970s, a Japanese car would be laughed off the road in America as a cheap poor man’s vehicle. But thins changed. Remember the Datsun 240Z? That was a car that showed us the Japanese were for real.  Datsun became Nissan and spawned Acura Infiniti, steadily moving up the chain toward even the [...]