Saturday, August 21, 2010

Daily Markets - Bank Stocks Are A Canary In The Coal Mine For The Broader Stock Market

Daily Markets - Bank Stocks Are A Canary In The Coal Mine For The Broader Stock Market

Bank Stocks Are A Canary In The Coal Mine For The Broader Stock Market

Posted: 21 Aug 2010 07:01 AM PDT

If there’s one sector of the stock market that trades like death warmed over, it’s the financials. Bank stocks simply can’t get out of their way these days.

Take the KBW Bank Index (BKX) of 24 leading U.S. banks. You can see in this chart that it plunged in April and May, and it hasn’t been able to get off the mat since. In fact, just this week, it’s collapsing to fresh, multi-month lows.

Why should you care?

Because the banks are a canary in the coal mine … [visit site to read more]

Adjusted Jobless Claims Update

Posted: 21 Aug 2010 06:38 AM PDT

It’s been a few months since I featured this pair of charts above showing: a) jobless claims vs. the labor force, and b) jobless claims as a share of the labor force, both updated through July (BLS data here and here).

The top chart shows why unadjusted jobless claims are meaningless: the size of the U.S. labor force has almost doubled over the last 42 years, from 77.57 million in 1968 to the current level of more than 153 million. The bottom chart shows jobless claims … [visit site to read more]

Quote Of The Day: Free Market Is A Bathroom Scale

Posted: 21 Aug 2010 05:17 AM PDT

“The free market is not an ideology or a creed or something we’re supposed to take on faith, it’s a measurement. It’s a bathroom scale. I may hate what I see when I step on the bathroom scale, but I can’t pass a law saying I weigh 160 pounds. Authoritarian governments think they can pass that law—a law to change the measurement of things.”

~P.J. O’Rourke quoted in today’s WSJ

Exhibit A: The minimum wage law.  A teenager with no work experience steps on a “bathroom scale” that … [visit site to read more]
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