Economics Update

Umm....Holy excrement?

The payroll firm ADP Employer Services just released its report as to job losses in December, 693,000 jobs lost.....In one month.....The ironically named Challenger, Gray & Christmas is also saying that layoffs reached a 5 year high in 2008.

The BLS will release its numbers on Friday, but I rather expect them to hew pretty closely to ADP's numbers, particularly since ADP has been working to make its survey match the government numbers.

It's no wonder that late loan payments are higher than at any point since 1980, there are a lot of people out of work.

In retail, we saw U.S. retail sales fell 0.8% YOY in the week following Christmas, and mall vacancies are at a 10 year high, rising from 6.6% to 7.1%, the highest quarterly jump ever recorded, and the highest vacancy rate ever recorded.

We are also seeing mortgage applications down for the first time in 4 weeks, though that could people waiting for the Federal Reserve's purchase of mortgage backed securities to drive rates lower.

We are seeing similarly grim economic data in Europe too.

About the only bright news is that GM is saying that it does not expect to need more in the way of loans...After $13.4 billion in tax dollars to GM and $6 Billion to GMAC, I would certainly hope so.

The jobs number drove the dollar down, and traders are starting to go long on the Canadian dollar, which implies that they expect commodities, oil and timber come to mind for Canada, to start going up again.

That being said, expectations were not met today, with oil falling by 12% on reports of large inventories.....They are literally running out of tanks to store the stuff.

Retail gasoline, however has risen for the 9th straight day, and is now higher than it was a month ago.....My thinking here is that there was an overshoot on the way down, and (assuming that oil stays around $50/bbl) we will be looking at $2/gal gas.