Friends
Well it looks like ECB President Mario Draghi might have over promised and under delivered when last week he indicated that the European Central Bank was “all in” and would do “whatever it takes” to preserve the euro, but today delivered little in terms of immediate details. Yes, as Dr. Bernanke did yesterday, the ECB has indicated that when needed they will be there with solutions. If not now, just let me know when they might be needed. On the other hand, maybe they should just go away for a while and let the markets figure things out.
Oh well, because Draghi really didn’t deliver the goods, stocks fell early and often. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, after being down almost 200 points, recovered some to end the day down 91 points to close at 12,879. The S&P 500 was down 10 points to finish the day at 1365. Gold was down $15 to trade at $1592 per ounce, while oil was down $1.60 to trade at $87.31 per barrel WTI.
On the economic front, the weekly jobless claims number, at 365,000 new claims, was about in line with expectations, but Factory orders were disappointing at a negative .5 which was much worse than expected. Tomorrow, we will get the all-important non-farm payroll number. The market is expecting about 100,000 new jobs to have been created in July. Let’s try to determine if good news is good news, or is bad news good news, or – well you know how this goes.
Something to ponder tonight- Facebook shares have now lost about 50% of their initial value in 50 days. Does losing 1% a day mean that the shares will be at zero 50 days from now?
Have a nice evening everyone.
