Monday, August 8, 2011

Stock market drop: Response to US ratings downgrade?

I was wondering where this was going to go.  Overnight, Dow Jones Industrial futures was down by as much as 290 points.  But looking at stocks doesn't tell you the real story...for that we look at US Treasuries.

Oil futures are also down.



But gold is shooting upwards.


What does this mean?  If we saw the UST yields shoot up, we could believe that the S&P downgrade was the cause.  But that's not what happened.

It means the market is focused not on the S&P downgrade, but on the market slowdown that is sending the US and much of Europe into another recession.

Oil futures are down because of fears that a slowdown would lower prices with less use and excess storage capacity.  Gold goes up every time there's a fear of anything that might affect stock prices negatively -- a recession for instance.

There is a lot of other data (inflation, total employment, large company layoffs, GDP) that show a slowdown in the economy.  By the way, the BLS shows that as of last month, we're still down by 6.8M jobs from January 2008 peak.  If we keep adding jobs at a rate of 120K a month, it'll take nearly 5 years before we fully recover, let alone accommodate population growth; that's why economists are pessimistic over the recovery, when we keep seeing new jobs numbers coming in relatively flat.

UPDATE 7:21 pm: DJI Futures show another 246 point plunge overnight so far, and the 10 year UST has dropped down to 2.27% yield, which is remarkable.  Consider some points of reference: 5/4/1990 10-year UST = 9.09% and 12/18/2008 10-year UST = 2.08%.   There might be bargain hunters jumping in on Tuesday when markets open, so it's no guarantee that there will be a continuation of Mad Monday, but if it Dark Tuesday happens, it wouldn't be a surprise -- this looks an awful lot like Sunday evening futures trading.

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