Today is a great day for Americans. We have proven our resiliency to track down evil and dispose of it. The world markets have responded with a positive open for the day but this week's economic focus for the US is going to be the unemployment report on Friday.
We have been seeing a nice trend over the past few months with the unemployment rates starting to creep back down slowly. The unfortunate part of this report is that hours worked did not edge up last month and we have seen an increase in continuing claims over the past few weeks. The consensus is that we will be at about 185,000 jobs created for the month of April. What we really want to see is a jump in numbers of 300,000 to see a sizable dent in the unemployment numbers. One factor that is hurting the unemployment numbers a bit is the reduction in government spending the last few months. We have seen the affect in our GDP report last Friday. Although probably good long term to have less governement spending lagging indicators like unemployment numbers can suffer from these actions.
I really look for the dollar strength or weekness to continue to control the interest rate environment. The markets keep moving up along with gold and silver but mainly because the US dollar is so week. I look for rates to be in a stable range around 4.7% on a 30yr fixed. If we break below 3.28 on the 10yr treasury we could have a nice pull back in rates.
Comments (1)Subscribe to CommentsComment