February 11, 2021 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Morning Briefing |
In a speech on Wednesday, Federal Reserve chair Jerome H. Powell said that the unemployment rate in January was close to 10%, not the 6.3% rate reported by the Labor Department last week.
February 8, 2021 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, You Might Have Missed |
Stocks climbed for a sixth straight day–the longest string of gains for the Standard & Poor’s 500 since August and with the Dow Jones Industrial Average turning in its best start for a February since 1931. The S&P 500 finished the day ahead 0.34% and the Dow gained 0.76% on the session. The NASDAQ Composite was up 0.95% and the NASDAQ 100 added 0.67%. The biggest winner for the day was the small cap Russell 2000, which gained 2.53% on strength in bank stocks and hope for more growth in the general economy. Oh, and the hope for $1,400 checks to individual Americans, hundreds of billions of dollars in state and local aid and enhanced federal unemployment benefits. And continued progress on the Covid-19 vaccination program. All this means, in my opinion, that the currently stretched valuations in this stock market are likely to get even more stretched in the coming days and weeks.
February 6, 2021 | Daily JAM |
Washington and the effort to pass the Biden Administration’s coronavirus stimulus/relief package will be the main–if not exactly the only–show in town.
February 5, 2021 | Daily JAM |
The U.S. economy added just 49,000 job in January. That was well below the addition of 100,000 jobs that economists surveyed by Bloomberg were looking for in the month. Despite that stocks climbed today, February 5. The Standard & Poor’s 500 gained 0.39% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average picked up 0.30%.
January 27, 2021 | Daily JAM, Videos |
I’m starting up my videos on JubakAM.com again–this time using YouTube as a platform. The eighth YouTube video “Forget Gamestope; It’s the Fed’s Bubble to Burst” went up today.
January 27, 2021 | Daily JAM |
Today, January 27, the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee left their benchmark interest rate unchanged near zero. The Fed also said that it would maintain the current program of bond buying at $120 billion a month until “substantial further progress” toward its employment and inflation goals has been made. It made no changes to the composition of purchases leaving the split at $80 billion a month in Treasuries and $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities.
January 12, 2021 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
For a day, at least, the seemingly inexorable climb in Treasury yields stopped. The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which is up 23 basis points in the last month, dropped back to 1.13%, a retreat of 2 basis points.
January 11, 2021 | Daily JAM, Videos |
The fifth YouTube video on why this very stretched market will hang in for another six months went up today.
January 8, 2021 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
The U.S. economy shed 140,000 jobs in December. That’s the first monthly job loss in eight months. Economists had expected the economy to pick up a very modest 50,000 jobs in the month. The official unemployment rate held at 6.7%.
January 7, 2021 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
The stock market is in the midst of euphoria at the prospect that unified Democratic control of the White House and Congress will mean more fiscal stimulus–those $2,000 checks for a start–increased aid to cities, and increased spending (maybe) on infrastructure and to combat global warming. The bond market not so much.
December 16, 2020 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
Today’s (Wednesday, December 16) meeting of the Federal Reserve, the last of the year for the central bank, ended with the promise to maintain the current massive monthly bond purchases of at least $120 billion until the Fed sees “substantial further progress” in employment and inflation. This replaces the earlier promise to keep buying “over coming months.” In other words the Fed’s bond buying policy now fits into the Fed’s interest rate framework of extraordinarily low for an extraordinary long time.
December 12, 2020 | Daily JAM |
Expect news from the Federal Reserve and from Congress on a government shutdown and a new coronavirus stimulus/relief bill. The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee meets on Wednesday, December 16. The markets expect the Fed to leave interest rates unchanged, but there’s likely to be verbiage out of the central bank that will move markets, although perhaps just fractionally.