Nothing in this sub is Personal Financial Advice. Personal attacks of any kind will not be tolerated. Please keep all comments civil and constructive. Please do not post business solicitation or referral links for your own financial advantage. If your link doesn't relate directly to Australia, please provide a short description detailing how you see the subject impacting Australia. This is a place for discussion and opinions. Nothing here is licensed personal financial advice. Please join our Discord Server for more personal finance discussions. Listen to “Dollars and Sense” on The World and Everythign in It.Welcome to AusFinance - Please read the sidebarĭiscussions relating to Australian Personal Finance, banking, investments, superannuation, insurance, and tax Please have a read of the Sub Rules before posting for the first time. After the unemployment report, it’s one of a half-dozen reports that I pay close attention to each month. It’s always a solid gauge of what’s happening in the economy, since retail sales and everything that gets us to the cash register-transportation, logistic, and manufacturing of consumer goods-accounts for up to 70 percent of the overall economy. It’s a fairly light week for government reports, but we will get the retail sales report on Thursday. Once again, another example of good news being bad news because of how the Fed might interpret the data. All in all that was not a bad report, but it sent the markets down. The unemployment rate ticked up to 5.5 percent from 5.4 percent as more people entered the work force. That number significantly beat expectations. economy added 280,000 jobs in May, the Labor Department said Friday. The big news for the week was the unemployment number. It’s hard to understand how Greece is going to be able to pay 1.6 billion euros at the end of the month when it can’t pay a fraction of that-just over 300-million Euros-now. When that day of reckoning comes, it will require a bigger payment. That averted the current crisis, but Greece just delayed the inevitable reckoning. Finally, late last week, we heard Greece would exercise an option in its debt plan and roll all its debt into a single package. As that date approached, and it became increasingly obvious Greece didn’t have the cash, the markets became more and more nervous. The beleagured country was supposed to make a debt payment on Friday. We keep talking about a deal in Greece and the deal keeps getting delayed. Still, the number was worse than expected. The Commerce Department released a revised first quarter Gross domestic product number last week, and we learned the economy actually shrank by a 0.7 percent annual rate. Any number above 50 represents growth, but 52.8 is really slow growth and the first increase months. The Institute for Supply Management, a trade group of purchasing managers, said its manufacturing index was 52.8 last month. We got a report last week that nonfarm productivity fell at a 3.1 percent annual rate in the first quarter. economy is not growing very fast, and growth and productivity seem to be slowing.
![how manipulation of the unemployment numbers help how manipulation of the unemployment numbers help](https://econofact.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/1.2-MarinescuTableauAug20WEB.png)
She’s right about at least one thing, though. Still, analysts saw LeGarde’s comment as a sign of fear over what will happen when the rates do finally start going up again. The Fed doesn’t take guidance from the IMF. economy and presumed to offer advice to the Fed, saying it shouldn’t raise interest rates until 2016. One final example from last week of how weird things are: Christine LeGarde, of the International Monetary Fund, cut its growth forecast for the U.S. That has added pressure on Beijing to roll out more measures to keep growth going there, and that sent Asian markets up.Īdvice from the IMF. HSBC’s manufacturing index showed manufacturing contracted for a third straight month. Take China: The China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing’s manufacturing index showed activity stagnating. The markets have been badly distorted by government manipulation both here and abroad. The fact that the European economy is getting better should have been good news, but it sent the markets down.īad news is good news. We got a great example on Wednesday, when European Central Bank head Mario Draghi said the ECB’s trillion-euro stimulus program was working to help the eurozone economy. The reason for this disconnect is government manipulation of the markets. But the stock markets are hanging around at near record highs. economy keeps growing, but it’s slow and not getting any faster. It has been a strange couple of weeks, even months, in the stock market.