12/04/09 Midday Report: Brother can I get a job? Well actually, maybe.

The market is soaring today as the payroll report was better than expected, unemployment actually dropped from 10.2% to 10% (depending on which numerator and denominator you choose to use, but those are just details), and the government significantly revised previous job loss declines.  In other news, the government also significantly revised the ending to Chasing Amy, the outcome of the Vietnam war (hey we won this time!  WooofuckingHoooo!), and the "no alcohol in fullly nude Las Vegas strip clubs" rule.  Of course there are still over 15MM people unemployed which is just slightly fewer than the entire population of Chile (and it's delicious capital city of Con Carne) and slightly more than the entire population of Cambodia.  So we're not quite out of the woods yet (and Elin Nordegren isn't out of the "woods" yet either, that is until they agree on a price).

Yesterday data was released showing more jobs being lost in the service industry while today the entire labor force seems to be getting less bad.  While we are happy the second derivative is moving in our favor (the rate of job loss is slowing), Money McBags has said it here before but the data is still very mixed and even though some of it shows improvement, it is all still very bad (though it's probably gone from Lindsay Lohan's hygiene bad, to just Lindsay Lohan's singing bad).

With a positive employment report out, traders have also begun to bet on interest rates going back up and not being kept down in perpetuity ala Alan Greenspan who never saw a bubble he couldn't inflate (actually, that is kind of literally true, since he never did see the bubble, and hence he inflated the fuck out of real estate values).  Bernanke seems to be a generally smart dude (Money McBags is reasonably happy with Bernanke's performance so far, but then again Money McBags was reasonably happy with MBND's last quarter and look how that worked out) and hopefully will bring rates back up at the appropriate time, but given the current lack of bank liquidity and lending in an environment where funds for them are cheaper than condoms at a retirement home, now is probably too early to bet on a move up in rates sooner than the end of 2010.

But the data this morning has further fueled this market rally and it remains a bit early to tell if this is real or if we are just feeling the effects of the inventory slashing and the stimulus.