American Morning
Minding Your Business
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/03/16/minding_your_busi_art.jpg caption=" CNN Business Correspondent Christine Romans is Minding Your Business everyday here on amFIX"]
Somehow over the past week, we've taken the edge off the desperation in the markets and economy.
Let me be clear: there is a lot of work to do and many difficult months ahead. I'm not ready to say confidence has returned, but certainly the gloom is not so thick.
Why? A more unified message is emerging (either by accident or by design) that yes, there IS a road to recovery and yes, we are trying to get on it.
The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, sat down with 60 Minutes because, he said, he wanted to speak directly to the American people. His message? The Fed is doing everything possible to support the economy. A recovery doesn't happen until the banks are stabilized. There is a plan for that but it will take time and patience.
Minding Your Business – Cramer vs. Stewart
Watercooler consensus this morning is Jon Stewart won the battle of the funny man and the money man. Stewart's ratings are up 20 percent since this 5-day feud erupted. Cramer's are down. No way to measure the value of all the free publicity these guys are generating because of it. (Though Stewart poked fun at being able to raise advertising rates because it.)
Stewart made the most eloquent assessment yet about how Wall Street's side-bets in complicated derivatives and its aggressive leveraging hurt the responsible buy-and-hold investors who are the backbone of the financial system. And CNBC was nothing more than a cheerleader, he blasts.
Leave it to the Daily Show's staff: They certainly watch ALOT of cable tv news tape. The big showdown last night between Stewart and CNBC Mad Money man Jim Cramer was chock full of embarrassing videotape of Cramer. Clips from 2006 (some featured a couple days ago by CNN's own Jim Acosta) that showed Cramer seeming to talk about manipulating the market.
Minding Your Business
You know the Sesame Street song: "Can you tell me how to get... how to get to the UNEMPLOYMENT OFFICE?"
First Wall Street, then Main Street, now Sesame Street. The children's tv icon will lay off 20 percent of its workers - 67 people - and the pain will be shared across all departments. The week has brought job cuts not only for children's television, but also United Technologies, McClatchy newspapers, 616 lawyers at two major law firms (yes, inviting all sorts of tasteless lawyer jokes) and Dell confirms it is cutting positions worldwide but won't say how many or where. (Why the mystery, Dell?)
Government data show four states now have unemployment rates topping 10 percent. Long-suffering Michigan tops the list with an incredible 11.6 percent. Many economists expect these numbers to keep rising. Here's the bright spot for the morning: A little more than a dozen states have jobless rates 6 percent or less (WY, ND, IA,UT, OK to name a few) and Texas' jobless rate is 6.4 percent, much better than the 8.1 percent average for the rest of the country. If you are living in any of these places, we can only hope that you're feeling a little better about things than the national statistics suggest.
Minding Your Business
What a rally! From a 12-year low to the best surge of the year for stocks Tuesday. But what happens next? We looked at the charts and found five rallies this year before Tuesday of 200 points or more. Each time, the Dow fell the next day. Two of those times, falling by triple digits. What that tells us, is this market has had a hard time holding onto those gains.
But some chart-watchers say the selling has been so relentless over the past three weeks, the market is ready for a true “bear-market rally.” But make no mistake: any true recovery in stocks doesn’t happen until the banking system gets fixed, confidence returns and lending frees up. We are not there yet.
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