June 16, 2020 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
May retail sales surged 17.7% from April. The pickup was a record month over month gain in data going back to 1992, the Commerce Department reported this morning. Stocks jumped on the news--as well as a trial balloon testing the waters on yet another attempt at a big...
June 13, 2020 | Daily JAM, Friday Trick or Trend |
Our regular (or occasional or perhaps occasionally regular) Friday series (actually running on Saturday this week) Trick or Trend looks at what might (or might not) be emerging investible trends. Exclusively on JAM. This post won't run anywhere else. Ever. I've read a...
June 11, 2020 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Morning Briefing |
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits continued to trend lower with 1.54 million workers applying in the week ended June 6. That's down from 1.9 million initial claims in the prior week. (Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had projected 1.55 million initial...
June 10, 2020 | Daily JAM |
What we know: The re-opening of the economies of will produce a surge in revenue for many businesses as some customers return. What we don't know: Will enough customers return with these re-openings to produce profits for these business. Airlines are a very useful...
June 9, 2020 | Daily JAM |
The Washington Post reports that about one third of food service and accommodation businesses that have received loans/grants from the Paycheck Protection Program have less than one month of cash left, Adam Ozimek, chief economist at Upwork, told the Washington Post....
June 6, 2020 | Daily JAM, Friday Trick or Trend |
To subscribe to JAM you need to fill in some details below including, ahem, some info on how you'll pay us. A subscription is $199 (although if you're subscribing with one of our special offers it will be lower) for a year for ongoing and continuing access to the...
June 5, 2020 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
I'd argue the last thing we needed today was good news. In case you're been hiding under a rock, you know that the economy unexpectedly added 2.5 million jobs in May and the unemployment rate fell to 13.3%. (Read my immediately prior post for a run down of why these...
June 4, 2020 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
Initial claims for unemployment for regular state programs totaled 1.88 million for the week ended May 30, according to the Labor Department. (This total does not include self-employed or gig workers that are now receiving unemployment under newly passed coronavirus...
June 3, 2020 | Daily JAM |
For the last month or more, positive expectations for the future have played into this rally. It didn't matter what the current numbers said about job losses or retail sales or initial claims for unemployment because the second quarter would mark the bottom and the...
May 28, 2020 | Daily JAM |
Couple of important, if disheartening clues on what the "new normal" will look like when it arrives in Wednesday's release of the Federal Reserve's "Beige Book" survey of economic conditions for the 6 weeks ended May 18. Two results from the survey caught my eye: In...
May 21, 2020 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Short Term |
According to the Department of Labor another 2.4 million Americans filed initial claims for unemployment in the week that ended May 16. That puts the total from this report at 38.6 million initial claims for unemployment filed in the last 9 weeks. The two-month total...