Jobless claims still improving

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Sep 24, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments I have said for sometime that the job market will be one of the last things to improve as the economy recovers. This is largely due to the expense of finding workers, training them, paying them and benefiting them. So businesses reluctantly hire. Last week the number of initial jobless claims fell by 21,000 to 530,000. Because this number is volatile a four-week moving average is frequently...
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Reality bites

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Sep 24, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments For the month of August existing home sales were down 2.7% compared to July. This broke a string a four consecutive positive months. My opinion is that this data is a bit of an aberration from overall economic improvement. Also within the report was the fact that overall housing inventory is 16.4% lower than a year ago. In other words, there are 16% fewer unsold homes on the market. This is a...
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Quality of credit ratings challenged in Congress

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Sep 23, 2009 in Blog | 2 comments A former Moody’s analyst is testifying before Congress today about what he claims are deceptive practices on the part of the credit ratings firm. Moody’s evaluates the credit worthiness of firms and of the debt securities that they issue. In turn these credit ratings are used as the basis for establishing the interest rates that are required to be paid by the issuer to investors. The...
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Ad chief not enthused about recovery

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Sep 21, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Happy Equinox, I hope that everyone had a pleasant weekend – the biggest news for me is that the Broncos are 2-0. Who’d a thunk it? There is a very telling interview today in the WSJ with the head of the largest advertiser in the world, WPP Group’s, Sir Martin Sorrell. In response to a question about future ad growth he states: “We describe the recession as L-shaped,...
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Woohoo, Federal Reserve plans to curb banker pay

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Sep 18, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments I was at a Borders bookstore recently when I saw an interesting title for a bio of FDR: “Traitor to His Class.” That aptly describes me when it comes to the ridiculous and outsize pay packages that Wall Street has notoriously awarded for decades. Now the Federal Reserve wants to rein that pay in. Woohoo! As proposed the Fed would be able to reject compensation packages that encourage...
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Jobless claims basically the same

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Sep 17, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Weekly jobless claims declined last week by a modest 12,000. The four week average, which aims to smooth weekly volatility, declined by 8,750. Given the huge number of jobs in the U.S., I would consider this to be flat job market performance. This is slightly disappointing. The last thing to improve in the economy will be the addition of thousands of new jobs. So what this 4-week average jobless...
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Housing starts up

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Sep 17, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Further proof that normalcy is almost, well, normal again: housing starts were up in August. The bulk of the 1.5% increase was due to new construction of apartments. Single family residences (i.e. not condos) were down for the first time in 6 months. Additionally building permits increased. While this seems like a modest statistic, consider that it takes a huge initial investment on the part of...
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