California water story is in the Coping section (follows this section) this morning…
This could be a pretty interesting weekend for the markets if you like playing weekly options. (No sane person would, but scratch tickets sell, too, for reasons I’ve never understood either – even when I buy them!)
So here’s the deal:
ADP came out with a job growth number of 180+ thousand on Wednesday.
This morning we see the Challenger, Gray, & Christmas just cut report for March (unless you’re blind, it’s there on the right and, if you are, it was down 36,594).
Here’s why it’s Economic Roulette: The market (US) is closed tomorrow for Good Friday. And, in the details to the Challenger press release this morning we read this:
CHICAGO, April 2, 2015 – Following two consecutive months of job cuts in excess of 50,000, the pace of downsizing slowed significantly in March, as US-based employers announced plans to trim payrolls by 36,594 during the month, according to new figures released Thursday by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.
The March total was 27.6 percent lower than the 50,579 job cuts in February. It was the lowest monthly total since December, when 32,640 were announced. Despite last month’s decline, the March figure was 6.4 percent higher than the same month a year ago (34,399), making it the fourth consecutive year-over-year increase.
Through the first quarter of 2014, employers announced 140,214 job cuts, up 15.6 percent from the 120,341 cuts tracked the first three months of 2014. The first quarter saw 17 percent more job cuts than in the final quarter of 2014, when 119,763 job cuts were recorded.
Of the 140,214 job cuts announced in the first quarter, 47,610 were directly attributed to falling oil prices.
So here’s the “real deal:” With 34% of the job cuts coming from the oil sector, and with oil stubbornly under $50 and likely going lower again, shortly, how will tomorrow’s March Unemployment report come out?
If you like scratch tickets, the weekly index options are one way to play it. But, it may be a little early. The shake out in the oil patch will be long and painful in a 50 Shades of Oil kind of way. So it’s too early to yell Uncle! (or whatever your word is).
And if you don’t know what the “your word” reference is, you need to cut economics and go back for a a remedial sex ed course.
Futures are down about 25 – I’m guessing sell-off toward the clothes….or something spelled like that, lol. More coffee!
In the Wake of Peoplenomics™ Yesterday…
This from our Winnipeg Bureau is worth mentioning:
Dear Mr. Ure,
This may be an opportune moment to visit the public face of Darpa’s “information innovation office” as the window for researchers to join its dark web search engine construction venture draws to a close. The project appears designed to serve internal customers while drawing upon the metadata of general citizenry for predicting patterns of behavior. Perhaps more specific rules of the new war will become apparent as the software gels. However, going forward, being more average than average could be a most profitable risk-aversion strategy?
Regards,
Not only is “average” the place to be going forward, but average-average makes sense. Just too many of them to stand out in.
Don’t Blame Me…
I just forecast things. When they happen, as seems to be evolving in Russia’s former buffer states, where Vlad Putin is nuclear saber-rattling, it’s because the forces of history are like big glaciers.
No doubt, Putin and the other Kremlinites, view the Baltic states energy resources the way Washington and New Yorker’s view fly-over state energy resources in places like Kansas and Okie-lahoma. There for the taking.
On the Bailing Out of Hillary
Oh, I just LOVE IT when NPR does a fact check and I mention it before my (one) liberal friend calls and points it out.
In this case the NPR “fact check” involves strict legality and the Clinton email mess.
So there’s the link. (I’m too busy to talk to my liberal friend today, anyway.)
Now Mr. Ure’s hard-ass analysis: What Hillary did is NOW a crime.
What makes a legendary criminal is doing crimes FIRST before there’s a law against it.
A few notable examples: Before D.B. Cooper, it was not a crime to skyjack an airplane. The air piracy laws followed the offense.
When Charles Ponzi pulled off his pyramiding operation, there was not such thing as a Ponzi Scheme. Yet again, laws followed the offense.
I could recite lots of other examples, too. How many drugs were invented and then made “illegal?” Laws follow the offense.
(Although in the case of some drugs, which are naturally occurring, laws were made up to punish the free-thinkers. As in Native Americans who could roast a bowl and do ‘shrooms or peyote but it slowed the religion-marketers who were self-righteously converting that they called “savages.” With government cooperation, these religion marketers were what we’d call extremists today and they were all about erecting toll-gates on the path to enlightenment which is about as corrupt as it gets, but I digress.)
Regardless of whether Hillary’s grand server wipe was in NPR’s analysis strictly legal isn’t the point. Ure’s point has been – and remains – that laws follow offenses and Ms Clinton? Well, figure it out on your own. But answer me this: Would you support D.B. Cooper for President?
Around here it’s “NO YAB-YACS” pal. No Yet-Another-Bush, no Yet-Another-Clinton.
Speaking of Politicians
I can’t help but comment on how a Nevada brothel is offering to host Harry Reid’s retirement party. But I will on the basis of “If you can’t write something nice, don’t write it at all.”
My tongue is bleeding from biting it, if you must know.
Military Recruiting
Has hit a new low with Al Qaeda (Saudi-backed, where’d the 9/11 folks hail from?) invading a prison in Yemen to free 270 potential recruits to fight the Shi’iters…
Meantime The Golfer-in Chief is still pressing with an Iran deal. Yes, he may claim to be a constitutional scholar, but he can’t tell time very well. Deadline was day before yesterday. Lines in the sand become holes in the narrative, obviously.
Notwithstanding this impairment, speculation builds that even though the republicans are almost certain to veto any Treaty, the GIC seems likely to imperially enforce through Executive Oversteps.
I must have missed the part in the Constitution about enforcing other than Laws of the Land. But he seems to have found it on a whole slew of topics including the MexBo and trade.
Shameless Hype
Yep. Care to guess what movie is out tomorrow?
Let me know when you care about the 5 million White House emails that were deleted illegally during the last Bush administration, or about the orders by Romney that 17 of his subordinates purchase state-owned disc drives and shred them as he left office in Massachusetts, or the similar actions by Governors Bush and Huckabee when they were leaving office. Strangely, all those men are quite vocal about what they suspect, even though they clearly destroyed public records, in some cases against the law. That simple, really.
Corruption is corruption regardless of party affiliation. It needs to be handled as a crime against the citizenry.
Hasn’t the State Department, and diplomats in general, ALWAYS depended upon ‘back channels’ non-public hidden means of communication to make things happen?
I initially thought, though, that the server would reveal more information between Hill and Bill, indicating that Bill is much more involved in everything that Hill was doing, even though he wasn’t elected or appointed or had any legal standing for making any decisions on behalf of the U.S. Puppetmaster?
The oilpatch ‘shakeout’ is VERY painful. Likely it will be the same as the 1985/6 version – lots of early or accelerated retirements offered (boomers are very ripe for those); many lower tier jobs vanish with the rig count (less rigs means less field sales types, trucks, roughnecks, etc.); bankruptcies begin to hit 4-6 months in (Sabine done, Samson, Sandridge, Swift, Midstates and Goodrich candidates); asset sales and door shuttering for independent service companies that cannot find a buyer; and then he knock-on effects. These include a housing price drop with repos, retail and construction declines and much more. Nationally they will get massaged away but locally they will be very apparent – just like in 1985/6.
New tribe name from last night’s episode of Survivor on CBS:
MERICA
Is the Hollywood propaganda machine trying to tell us something…again?
regarding – legality –
the legal system rhymes with “regal”… need I say more?
With “statues” the base word is “state”
and so thus yes, they state it after the fact,
that is if they so desire. Their rules, their game.
In common law, one only need to know this –
if there is an injured party, a crime was committed.