The news is almost universally bad today. After the market rallied powerfully to erase a 150-point Dow loss yesterday, today the news is bad, bad, bad.
Home sales are down 7 months in a row! Case/Shiller is tanking!
The Baltic Dry Index continues to tank!
Chicago PMI was down, surprising the market to the downside!
The U.S. is on the verge of sharp job losses, according to Art Cashin!
From Art Cashin UBS Financial Services:
Disappointing Jobs - While everyone seems to debating what the non-farm payroll numb will be Friday, a few are looking toward the annual revisions in the much debated Birth/Death model.
As you probably recall, it does not refer to the birth or death of humans. The badly named model refers to the birth and death of businesses. Each January the BLS revises the number, usually vaporizing thousands of jobs.
We were going to try and calculate the likely revision, but our sharp-eyed friend over at Bloomberg, Rich Yamarone, as usual, beat us to it. Here’s what he wrote in his Notepad column recently:
The Net Birth/Death (NBD) statistic adjustment – an adjustment the BLS uses to account for job creation or loss with respect to births and deaths of businesses – is always the weakest during January. Over the last five years the NBD for January has averaged -335k. [January 2011: -339k, January 2010: -427k, January2009: -356k, January 2008: -378k, January2007: -175k.]
The CBO says the real unemployment rate is 10%!
"Had that portion of the decline in the labor force participation rate since 2007 that is attributable to neither the aging of the baby boomers nor the downturn in the business cycle (on the basis of the experience in previous downturns) not occurred, the unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2011 would have been about 1¼ percentage points higher than the actual rate of 8.7 percent"- translation: CBO just admitted that the BLS numbers are bogus and real unemployment is 10%.
The latest "treaty" out of Europe leave much to be desired, despite that Euro-zone countries are going to be required to give up most of their sovereignty.
Retail sales in Germany are slumping.
Europe data shows almost certain recession in the area with the largest GDP in the world.
