The Associated Press is shocked to find that despite President Obama’s magical powers to heal all ills the recession is not over and more importantly Americans are still being hit hard by unemployment:
The number of newly laid-off workers filing claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week. But the four-week average for jobless claims, which smooths out fluctuations, fell. That was an encouraging sign that the pace of layoffs continues to decline. The four-week average is now at its lowest point since late September 2008, when the financial crisis hit with full force.
Separately, a forecast of economic activity rose for the eighth straight month in November, a private research group said, signaling the economic rebound will continue into next year.
Still, employers across the country remain reluctant to ramp up hiring.
“People who have already lost their job are having incredible difficulty finding a job,” Dan Greenhaus, an economist at Miller Tabak, said in a research note Thursday.
A big problem is that companies lack confidence in the strength and sustainability of the recovery. FedEx Corp., for example, offered a tepid outlook Thursday for the quarter that ends in January. The package delivery company expects the recovery to continue next year. But FedEx questioned whether demand for its services will stay strong after the peak holiday-shipping season.
Stocks fell on concerns about a still-weak job market and after FedEx’s forecast fell short of expectations. In mid-afternoon trading, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 98 points, or about 0.9 percent. Broader stock averages also fell.
Uh. Yeah. The Dow actually closed -132 or so but the A.P. fails to point out that continuing unemployment numbers are way up, thus “recovery” is not coming if almost two million people are on unemployment and those numbers don’t count the hundreds of thousands of people whose benefits ran out before they found work. Economists don’t count those people in a cynical ploy to paint a rosy picture. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has a good analysis of the A.P. piece.
Here’s a good overview of what this all could mean for your money:
Those numbers would be bad enough, but Bloomberg just reported on the food inflation numbers which would be devastating even if the economy was recovering:
Dec. 14 (Bloomberg) — Falling production in commodities from rice to milk is bad news for just about everyone except investors.
Rice may surge 63 percent to $1,038 a metric ton from $638 on Philippine imports and a shortage in India, a Bloomberg survey of importers, exporters and analysts showed. The U.S. government says nonfat dry milk may jump 39 percent next year, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. forecasts a 25 percent gain for sugar. Global food costs jumped 7 percent in November, the most since February 2008, four months before reaching a record, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
[…]
“Inventories are extremely low in a number of grains markets,†Barclays Capital said Dec. 10. “The prospect of a further bout of food-price inflation in 2010 cannot be ruled out since many of the factors that contributed to higher prices in 2007 and 2008 are still a feature.â€
Stockpiles of corn and rice will drop before the 2010 harvest for the first time in three years, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show. The International Sugar Organization forecasts a second straight global supply deficit in the year through September 2010, and the USDA predicts stores of the sweetener will drop to the lowest level since 1995.
[…]
Wholesale-pork prices in the U.S. are up 27 percent this year, heading for the first annual gain since 2004, as farmers hurt by two years of losses cut the domestic breeding herd to the smallest level since the USDA started collecting the data in 1964. Chicken output is sliding in the U.S., where the number of eggs placed into incubators each week is headed to the lowest quarterly average since 2002.
“The tendency for food prices is up, it’s not down,†Unilever Chief Executive Officer Paul Polman said Dec. 11 in a Bloomberg Television interview in Copenhagen. Rotterdam- and London-based Unilever, the largest consumer-product company after Procter & Gamble Co. in Cincinnati, makes Lipton tea, Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Bertolli sauces. “We need to be sure that we have the food supply, that we don’t waste, and that we continue to get increasingly efficient means to get that food to the consumers,†Polman said.
The risk of accelerating prices may be muted by “healthy†gains in inventories, including wheat, according to the FAO. Supplies in warehouses are enough to meet about 23 percent of global demand, compared with 19 percent two years ago, the FAO said last week. Inventories are “far more comfortable†than during last year’s crisis, the UN agency said.
Last year food shortages sparked riots in at countries such as Haiti and the Philippines. Ironically it was the credit crunch that ended up driving down food prices. But with the U.N. bragging about being able to meet less than 1/4 the demand for food aid I think it’ll be prudent to stock up on food now.
The U.S. National Debt has surpassed the statutory limit and the Fed’s low interest rate policy is designed to hurt savers (among other things)Â which is one thing Americans need to do to protect themselves.
And of course we’re starting to see gold and silver rationing, which is a very bad sign. In this environment bad economic news should come as no surprise.