The U.S. Labor Department said this morning that nonfarm payrolls fell by 467,000 in June.  This unexpectedly large drop was quite negative for the market.  Read the full story

A little over a week ago the title to one of my articles was “Employment Numbers Are About To Get Historically Bad”. The article was looking ahead to last Friday’s employment report, which had it followed expectations would have shown another 600,000 jobs lost in April. Fortunately for us, the report wasn’t as bad as expected. However, the job losses are still significant and still approaching historical levels. Read the full story

Monday

Economic Reports: Pending Home Sales

The Pending Home Sales report for March comes out this morning at 10:00 am, and I am a little surprised by the expectations (flat). With all the foreclosures continuing, and prices still sliding, I think this report will show a modest increase in Pending Home Sales. Read the full story

The economic calendar is rather uneventful this week, so I wanted to focus on the big news from last week, namely the employment figures from last Friday. Read the full story

Consumer Confidence is expected to show an improvement in March when the report is released tomorrow morning. Nothing comes to mind as the reason for this sudden jump, so it may be nothing other than things were so bad, they could only get better at some point. Read the full story