I knew it. I could feel it happen as soon as I typed it. I could sense that as I was going to make a recommendation on where the market was going, it was going to immediately prove me wrong. That is how the market operates. I’m still not confident in the general market’s prospects. It’s support is slowly waning. Like I said yesterday, clarity on it’s prospects to run higher are dependent on the money stock report that comes out Tuesday. Also, the mega-sized bills attempting to wade through Congress could also give the market a boost. It seems that passage is no sure deal as Nancy Pelosi is having big problems keeping her party from dissolving into in-fighting.
Yesterday saw the weekly release of the unemployment claims. The picture is continuing to slowly improve. We are still 143k higher in initial claims and 1.122M higher in continued claims when compared to the February 1, 2020 data. This still gives the Fed wiggle room to say that the stable employment portion of their dual mandate hasn’t been fulfilled.
The data also showed that less than 10k people left the pandemic assistance. With the announcement from the administration that they will not seek to extend the assistance, we will see the end come on September 6th. Since the report’s pandemic assistance claims data is delayed by a month, we won’t see it roll off the data until September 30th.