Treasuries pulled back this afternoon pushing the 10-year bond yield back up to 3.37%. There is an increasing amount of chatter that the Fed is considering raising the stakes on their Treasury re-purchase program. The current ceiling on the program is $300 Billion. As we’ve discussed before that isn’t a terribly large amount of money in terms of overall Treasury market volume.
The ranks of the unemployed continue to multiply
Today’s Initial Claims number was expected to show that there were 625,000 new claims for unemployment benefits over the prior week…it actually posted 631,000. That marks the 16th consecutive week that Initial Claims has posted above 600,000. It is an ugly, ugly trend.
We also got a look at Continuing Claims today. There are now 6.66 million people drawing unemployment benefits. This is a number that needs some perspective. If everyone in the country had to get their unemployment benefits check from the same office, then the line of 6.6 million people would stretch from New York to Los Angeles. I assume in this analysis that each person would take up 2 feet of space…personal space is always an issue.
For the northern California folks it would be from San Francisco to Philadelphia.
For our Florida friends it would be from Orlando to Seattle.
And for the folks in Texas we’re talking about a line from Dallas to Panama City, Panama; or somewhere in the Arctic Circle…tough line to be in but you can’t go 2,500 miles east or west out of Dallas without having a lot of the people in the Atlantic or Pacific.
If I DROVE to the back of the line it would take me 4 days and I would burn $375 in gas.
I’ve attached a chart of the Continuing Claims data below.
There is no more economic data scheduled for release this week.
If you have any questions or if there is anything I can be doing for you please let me know.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment