ExxonMobil’s (XOM) May 26 annual meeting has turned into a referendum on the global oil industry and climate change. At issue is a key question for the industry and the global climate: How much of the oil that’s been discovered to date but not pumped so far will stay in the ground?
444,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment in regular state programs for the week, the Labor Department reported today. That’s the third consecutive weekly decline in initial claims for unemployment. New claims in regular state programs are now at the lowest level since the middle of March 2020. Last year at this time weekly new claims for unemployment in regular state programs hit 2.3 million.
The minutes from the Federal Reserve’s April 28 meeting show officials at the central bank edging toward talking about when to cut bond buying and raise interest rates. Fed members said they need to see “substantial” further progress toward their goals of inflation that averages 2% and a full recovery in the labor market before slowing down $120 billion in monthly bond purchases. That’s language that the Fed had used before and has used since the meeting.
Here are my first five stock picks for my Special Report on finding “Real Green” Stocks. These are my “low-hanging fruit” stocks for climate change.
A day after the market plunged on worse than expected inflation numbers for April, today, May 12, stocks moved up to recover part of their drop on another decree in the weekly initial claims for unemployment numbers. For the week ending May 8, seasonally adjusted initial claims for unemployment in regular state programs was 473,000. That’s a decrease of 34,000 from the previous week’s revised level. And it’s the lowest level for new claims for unemployment since the week of March 14, 2020. (That’s before the pandemic recession really hit full speed.) For the week of March 14, 2020, initial claims for unemployment wee 256,000.
Consumer prices, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) soared in April. For the month prices in the all-item index gained 0.8% for a 12-month increase of 4.2%. The core CPI, which excludes volatile prices in the food and energy sectors, was up 0.9% in April and is now up 3.0% over the last 12 months. But what’s it all mean?
Stocks are down across the markets today–with the Standard & Poor’s 500 lower by 0.87% at the close, the Dow down 1.36%, and the NASDAQ Composite off 0.09%–ahead of tomorrow’s report on the Consumer Price Index read on inflation. But the real action today is in the CBOE S&P 500 Volatility Index (VIX) as investors and traders look to buy protection against potential volatility in case inflation, expected to head higher tomorrow for April, really spikes higher.
Today’s drop in stocks–a drop of 1.04% for the Standard & Poor’s 500 and a loss of 2.55% for the NASDAQ Composite at the close on May 10–is a reminder that runaway economic growth is only one horn of the financial market’s fears about the Federal Reserve and higher interest rates.
The U.S. economy added just 266,000 jobs in April, far fewer than the 1 million economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected, the Labor Department reported this morning. The unemployment rate rose to 6.1% in April from 6.0% in March
U.S. private employers in April added the most jobs in seven months, according to data from the ADP Research Institute released today. Company payrolls rose by 743,000 in the month. That’s a big gain from the upwardly revised 565,000 gain in March. And it’s the biggest money gain in jobs in seven months. That increases worries that Friday’s April jobs report from the Commerce Department will show a gain for the month of nearly 1 million new jobs. Good news for workers, of course, but that would increase fears in the financial markets that we’re seeing the kind of sustained, multi-month gains in jobs that the Federal Reserve has said it needs to see before it begins to raise interest rates.
The U.S. economy is likely to have added 978,000 jobs in April, the Bureau of Economic Analysis will report on Friday May 5, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg. That would be up from March’s gain of 916,000 jobs and would be the biggest increase since August 2020. It would probably send the unemployment rate down to 5.7% in April from 6% in March. The report will also put added pressure on the Federal Reserve to begin to reduce its program of buying $120 billion a month in Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities to support the economy. An initial reduction in the size of that program would be seen by the financial markets as a sign that the central bank is beginning to think about raising interest rates.
Data from Refinitiv published yesterday show that companies are beating estimates at a historic rate and that the amount by which they are beating projections is also at a historic high. Of the Standard & Poor’s 500 companies reporting so far, 86.8% have beat Wall Street projections. The average beat is a huge 23.5%. According to Refinitiv (where data goes back to 1994) that’s the highest percentage of companies to beat estimates for a quarter on record and also the largest average beat on record. Three things to think about.
