Thursday, April 1, 2010

Massive Coincidence...

Greetings good citizen,

I’m feeling a bit ‘nostalgic’ today (fair warning) so if you don’t like reading about the ONLY universal indicator of economic, er, ‘health’ available to us, STOP RIGHT NOW!

Unsurprisingly, (now that the markets are hooked up directly to the vaults of the Treasury with the full support of that private enterprise that calls itself ‘The Fed’) the markets are up. Equally unremarkable is the fact that there is no rational reason as to ‘why’ the markets are up…none whatsoever.

Naturally, you can understand why the powers that be desire the markets to be ‘up’ considering it was their idea that people funnel their retirement funds into the stockmarkets so their ‘nest eggs’ could hatch into incredible ‘riches’ [for the brokers, not the savers.] Which would ultimately be stolen by bond traders with worthless Mortgage backed securities that nobody in their right mind would have bought…if they hadn’t been branded AAA by the ratings agencies first…

How anybody can call this an ‘accident’ and keep a straight face is pretty incredible. Worse, the same people who believed in ‘efficient markets’ that couldn’t find their own ass with both god damn hands and (claim to have had) ‘no idea’ the products they were selling were worthless really stretches the limits of credibility.

Perhaps it is time for us to adopt the same attitude they did when they knowingly threw the financial system into the cesspool…’at least we’ll have a lot of company in prison!’

No, we shouldn’t all report to prison…but we should make their ‘prophecy’ come true!

Like war criminals, one can expect every one of them to defend their actions with A.) ‘Everyone else’ was doing it or B.) I was just ‘following orders’ (which speaks volumes about another disturbing aspect of capitalism…it doesn’t exactly promote/value ‘free will’ or ‘independent judgement.’

A ‘flaw’ that, given our current predicament, might just prove ‘fatal’. (Understand that the ‘fatal blow’ to State communism was the double whipsaw of ‘unfair wages’ and out of control prices/empty shelves.)

Coming soon to a shopping center near you…

But we digress…

Onward with tonight’s offering


Markets Rise Ahead of Jobless Data
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
Published: April 1, 2010

With better job prospects seemingly on the horizon, Wall Street indexes raced out of the gate on Thursday. [Keep dreamin’ fella’s! The REAL reason the unemployment rate is ‘improving’ is because millions of people have exhausted their benefits and are now no longer ‘counted’ as unemployed.]

Investors were betting that the American labor market was on the cusp of showing substantial job growth. The Labor Department reported Thursday that the number of people filing first-time unemployment claims fell last week, bolstering hopes that the economy was beginning to add jobs. [As if to add ‘credibility’ to these claims, there has indeed been a definite ‘uptick’ in help wanted activity…too bad most of these postings require 4 year degrees AND several years of highly specialized industry experience…and if you don’t have an ‘exact match’, the recruiter won’t even talk to you. These are the same ‘fishing expeditions’ we saw during the last two so-called ‘recoveries’.]

On Friday, the government will release its report on employment in March, and the more optimistic analysts believe as many as 400,000 jobs were created last month, partly because of hiring for the Census and stormy weather the month before. The consensus estimate is 182,000 jobs. [Um, Workers in the US (as well as other ‘industrialized’ nations) continue to lose purchasing power, month after month, so who, precisely, is driving this uptick in hiring? Understand that even the government ‘bounty/incentives’ is incapable of producing jobs where there is no demand!

“There’s a growing sense that things are probably not getting worse,” said William J. Schultz, chief investment officer for McQueen, Ball & Associates. “People are grudgingly putting money back into the market.” [Neither statement should be interpreted as a ‘glowing endorsement’ of the economy but, in an interesting case of ‘turnabout’, now the Pollyanna’s are getting a taste of their own medicine, having trumpeted the, thus far, ‘invisible recovery’ for so long. Oh, while I have you here…tens of millions of people exhausting their unemployment benefits DOES NOT constitute ‘a recovery’ and the NBER agrees!]

Within minutes of the open, the major indexes were flirting with 1 percent gains. [That little tidbit of information should be enough to give all of us heartburn, considering whose money is being ‘burned’ to drive up stock prices!]

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 80.41 points, or 0.74 percent, placing it about 60 points from the 11,000 mark. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index climbed 9.96 points, or 0.853 percent, and the Nasdaq gained 11.60 points or 0.48 percent.

American indexes followed a global rally, with European and Asian indexes rising more than 1 percent in response to signs that the global recovery was intact. China and Japan reported improving business confidence. European manufacturers indicated rising export orders and better overall conditions in March. [Don’t you just love, ‘if we all close our eyes and wish real hard, it will come true!’…er, ‘brainwashing’…delusions, whatever! It seems they never tire of proving P.T. Barnum right.]

A survey on the state of American manufacturing released Thursday showed manufacturing expanded for an eighth consecutive month in March, helped by a surge in orders and production. [Um, where in the U.S.A. did this occur? Or did I misconstrue and ‘America’ means somewhere else in the Western Hemisphere? Because right now it is looking like most of this work, if it exists at all, has to be in either Mexico or Canada…which are both, coincidentally, part of ‘America’…]

Some of Thursday’s momentum came because the market is closed on Friday in observance of Good Friday, and traders were reacting early to what they expect to be a bright employment report. In addition, Thursday marked the first day of the second quarter, luring new cash into equities. [Sure, like THAT explains everything!]

But a central driver of Thursday’s gains was a report showing signs of improvement for the jobs market. The Labor Department reported that jobless claims fell to 439,000 last week, continuing a downward trend and meeting expectations. [As I write this we are still two hours away from the closing bell, so we can only wonder where all of this ‘optimism’ is coming from…]

That helped calm the jitters that had surfaced in the market on Wednesday when a report indicated that the private sector lost jobs in March. The data from ADP showed private payroll losses totaled 23,000 jobs for the month, while Wall Street had expected a gain of 40,000 jobs. [But who are you going to believe, data based on actual payrolls or ‘solid’ government ‘birth/death model’ statistics? (which have so far proven wildly unreliable!)]

As hopes for a recovery strengthened, United States Steel surged 2.7 percent, helping lead a rally for the materials sector.

The energy sector extended a rally as the price of oil climbed. Chevron rose 1.2 percent, and Exxon Mobil gained 0.9 percent. [Coming on the heels of yesterday’s announcement, that’s a real shock, isn’t it?]

Transocean, a large offshore drilling company, gained 0.9 percent as investors continued to see the profit-making potential of opening more areas to offshore oil and natural gas drilling.


So, I guess it is just a ‘massive coincidence’ that the ‘invisible recovery’ is still on after yesterday’s ‘feel good’ announcement.

Which is to ask do you sometime think these assholes are jerking you around? You KNOW what you’re ‘SUPPOSED’ to think…that you’re not seeing what they’re seeing because you’re not where it’s happening.

The fact that you’ve NEVER been ‘where it’s happening’ is starting to bother you…more than just a little.

So you scour the papers, looking for ‘proof positive’ that all of this ‘recovery talk’ isn’t just that…talk.

And guess what…you can’t find anything.

But that’s because you suck at looking for stuff (actually, what these clowns are reporting isn’t significant enough to make the news, that’s why you seldom find the story.)

The collective ‘we’ are the victims of ‘snowballing’, the media’s need to create news where there is none. Without news they’d have nothing to sell!

Worse, most of the stuff people would pay to know…they can’t report on it because it would ‘piss off’ their advertisers!

So much for our (essentially worthless and more than a little dangerous) ‘Free press’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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