The Bureau of Economic Analysis is set to release its first estimate of fourth-quarter GDP on Thursday before the market opens. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg are expecting that annualized GDP growth in the quarter rose by 5.5%. That would be a huge increase from the 2.3% rate reported for the third quarter.
Yesterday the Standard & Poor’s 500 fell 1.14% and market leading stocks such as Applied Materials (AMAT) dropped 0.78%. Big drug stocks made up the only sector in the green as Pfizer (PFE) rose 2.59%,and AbbVie (ABBV) gained 1.23%. The fears yesterday were that the Omicron Variant of the Covid-19 virus would slow the economy and that Senator Joe Manchin had just killed prospects for any stimulus from the Biden Administration’s Build Back Better bill. Today the S&P 500 closed up 1.78%. A market leader like Applied Materials rose 4.42%. A big drug stock such as Pfizer was down 3.39%.
As we contemplate the extraordinarily strong earnings from Wall Street’s big banks last week, it’s important to remember that Wall Street isn’t Main Street.
I’m starting up my videos on JubakAM.com again–this time using YouTube as a platform. My fifty-eighth YouTube video “3 Picks for Iffy Growth” went up today.
I’m starting up my videos on JubakAM.com again–this time using YouTube as a platform. My forty-ninth YouTube video “The market’s big fear is the economy” went up today.
Just about all of the Pandemic stimulus programs–checks for households, no-cost small business loans, enhanced unemployment payments–will have expired by sometime in 2022. Which is leading economists to project a slowdown in the U.S. economy for the second half of 2022. No matter what the size of the Biden administration budget finally turns out to be. U.S. fiscal policy will go from stimulating economic activity to acting as a drag on the economy. The Brookings Institution’s Hutchins Center calculates that the economic impact from federal, state and local-government taxes and spending turned negative in the second quarter of 2021 and will remain that way into 2023.
We want to see the job gains before we remove any support for the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said at an event at the International Monetary Fund, on Thursday, April 8. Putting another marker in the ground on when the central bank might start to cut back on its schedule to purchase $120 billion a month in Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities–and then to raise its benchmark interest rate, Powell said the Fed wants to see a string of months like March when the economy added 916,000 jobs.
Initial claims for unemployment benefits through regular state programs climbed to 1.15 million on an unadjusted basis for the week ended January 9. On a seasonally adjusted basis claims rose to 965,000, an increase of 181,000 in the week. Add 284,000 new claims filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, an emergency federal program for freelancers, part-time workers and others normally ineligible for state jobless benefits. It was the first week since July in which the unadjusted number of new state claims exceeded one million.
For the week ended November 14, 742,000 workers filed new claims for unemployment in regular state programs. That was an increase of 31,000 from the prior week. The increase was the first in five weeks.
According to a report from the Century Foundation, 12 million Americans are set to lose unemployment insurance by the end of 2020 with the bulk of those 7.3 million set to lose their benefits on December 26.
