All week on the show we’ve been talking about strategic cornerstones for 2012. We’ve looked at gold and real estate pretty extensively, and I hope to get to grains and softs next week. Today, we talked quite a bit about oil. As I see it, one of the big surprises in the evolution of the [...]

Housing remains in focus today, with starts rebounding to 9.3% and permits up 6%. Both of those numbers are much better than expected, and the market seems to like them early in today’s session. But they’re also not telling us the whole story. As nice as those numbers may sound, the fact is that a [...]

Early in today’s session, Best Buy’s stock price is getting kicked around on reports that their third quarter earnings fell by 13%. My co-host Sara Ritz, aka the Market Belle, mentioned on the show this morning how she wasn’t surprises at all about Best Buy’s miss. After all, their stores have essentially turned into a [...]

Folks, I’m making my way back to Chicago today after taking part in yesterday’s Biz 880 Miami Money Expo. Big thanks to Bull & Bear Institute, Currensee, Daniel “The MoneyMan” Frishberg, Charles Schwab and everyone who came out for making the event a rousing success. All the presentations and breakout sessions on stocks, futures, real [...]

Folks, I mentioned yesterday how the PPI came out a little hotter than expected, and that I wanted to see today’s CPI come out in line with it. That turned out to be the case. When you subtract the core, producer prices increased .2% in September, while consumer prices rose .3%. That tells me that [...]

Folks, there are three distinct factors that are driving these markets right now: earnings, Europe and China. Let’s break it down, shall we? Earnings. I’ve talked a lot about the lowering of expectations for corporate earnings and how they might have gotten too low over the course of the last couple of months. I also [...]

Well, folks, what can I say? Today’s monthly jobs number: zero. The economy created no net jobs in August, and the unemployment rate is 9.1%. I’m disgusted. Mr. President, where are the jobs you promised us? Where is the economic recovery we were supposed to see? With all due respect for the office, you should [...]

Folks, earlier this morning we got two lukewarm economic reports. On the jobs front: for the first time since April, the weekly unemployment claims fell below 400,000.  It wasn’t by much—the seasonally adjusted number of new claims came in at 398,000—but even that small downtick caused the markets to jump. As far as housing, the [...]

Folks, as expected, the unemployment numbers that were released this morning were not very good. According to the Labor Department, non-farm payrolls increased 54,000 last month—the weakest number we’ve seen since September 2010. And earlier this week, we saw that private employment increased just 83,000, the worst in a year, while government payrolls fell by [...]

Yesterday we got some pretty bad news on the job-creation front from the private sector, and as a result we saw the biggest selloff since August of 2010. Tomorrow we get the big unemployment numbers from the government. If you listen to the projections, we’re probably in for more of the same. There’s an old [...]