The good news, U.S. stock futures rose last night. The bad news, the reason why:
U.S. stock-index futures advanced on speculation a government report showing the highest unemployment rate since 1992 will force Congress to pass an economic stimulus package.
∙ U.S. Stock Futures Rise on Optimism Jobs Data to Spur Stimulus [Bloomberg]
∙ U.S. Jobless Rate Soars as Payrolls Plunge by 598,000 [Bloomberg]
The stock market is after all about expectations. I guess we met expectations?
Yeah, it’s bad, and there is a lot more coming in SF and elsewhere. I can’t tell you how many WARN Act filings/notices we’re working on right now (seriously, I can’t tell you — it’s confidential ;)). But it’s a lot; our labor & employment group is overwhelmed with work. I’m more bullish than many here on the long-term prospects for the Bay Area economy, but the next couple of years are going to be quite bad.
Stock market is a leading indicator: it rises well before the economy rebounds. Housing market on the other hand is a lagging indicator. They won’t pick up till the employment and economy has fully recovered. So don’t believe it when Yun and NAR lobby say the economy won’t recover till the housing market recovers. They got it backward to get the congress to put the housing market on TARP welfare.
The stock market is supposedly forward looking but it is not a leading economic indicator. The Dow could jump to 14k but it wouldn’t indicate that the underlying fundamentals are any better. If people met some of the monkeys driving the equity markets, they wouldn’t put so much faith into what the Dow,S&P,etc “indicate”.
cs, check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Leading_Indicators
Citing wikipedia is not really all that sweet.
Certain stock data is included in the index of leading indicators. See:
http://www.conference-board.org/pdf_free/economics/bci/IndexMondayJan.pdf