Economics Update, One Day Late

Normally, I don't comment on stock market swings, but the Dow closing above 9000 for the first time since January allows me to invoke this Dragonball Z meme, sorry.^*

Yes, I know that this should have been done yesterday, but once I got all the links together, we had heavy thunder storms, and so I shut down for the evening.

In any case, yesterday was unemployment claims Thursday, and new claims are up by 30K to 554K, but note that these numbers are all seasonally adjusted, which means that they really are not particularly valid, since the July shutdowns of GM and Chrysler happened in the spring of this year, so for this week, and to a lesser degree next week, we are flying blind on these statistics.

That being said, I think that the numbers on continuing claims are still valid, or at least more valid, and those numbers fell 88K to 6.225 million.

In any case, 550,000 weekly new unemployment claims, or for that matter anything over 400,000 new claims, is a grim picture, and so we are still well within the "grimness event horizon."

I would also note that downward pressure on the continuing claims numbers is coming from people who are exhausting their unemployment benefits, and as Peter Boockvar at The Big Picture notes, the number of people on emergency unemployment benefits, which cut in after 26 weeks, are way up, but they are not counted in the continuing claims numbers.

So, I would not put a whole bunch of credence in the normally reported unemployment numbers until probably the August 7 numbers.

In terms of more general economic news, we have credit card charge offs rising again in June, hotel revenues down and vacancies up, and on a conference call, the CEO of UPS noted that he is not seeing any signs of recovery in his shipping business.

On the plus side, Canadian consumer confidence rose in July, and there was a surprise jump in U.K. retail sales, largely on increased purchases of clothing, which means that the Brits are poor, but not poorly dressed.

In real estate, existing home sales rose in June, but it should be noted that ¹/₃ of these are distressed sales, either foreclosures or short sales, and it should also be noted that prices are still falling off a cliff, down 15.4% year over year.

Mortgage rates are marginally lower, probably in reaction to Bernanke's testimony before the Congress.

In the area of news that sounds important, but that I cannot for the life of me suss out what it means, it appears that Swiss banks are running out of vault space for gold bullion.

Finally, oil rose and the dollar fell yesterday.

^*OK, I'm really not sorry, not one little bit.