Its all Greek today on the Jack B. Show.  Alan Rohrbach joins in the discussion with Jack and Sara.  Technical and psychological views of the markets are given with special attention paid to China, Gold, the Aussie Dollar and S&Ps. Click here to listen to this podcast

Folks, this morning’s ADP number blew away street. Private-sector payrolls increased by 325,000 last month, far surpassing the forecast of 178,000. Now the expectations for tomorrow’s non-farm payrolls are even higher, but the range is still pretty significant—the projections are anywhere from 110,000-200,000. Tomorrow’s number will be the real tell, of course, but it’s nice [...]

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 [...]

Folks, we got some moderately good news on the jobs front this morning. For the week ending October 29, unemployment claims dropped to a seasonally adjusted 397,000, the lowest in more than a month. It’s a modest improvement of 9,000 from the week prior and still alarmingly high, but psychologically, coming in under that 400,000 [...]

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 [...]

Folks, as I write this, the yield on the 10-year is 1.7%, and the reason is because there is a ton of confusion out there in the marketplace. So much, in fact, that people are willing to go into a net-negative interest rate situation (at least for the short term) because of the uncertainty with [...]

Folks, it appears like we’re on the verge, once again, of a Greek bankruptcy or default. I still maintain that this does not portend a breakup of the European Union. A default in Greece would be roughly the equivalent of, say, California or New York City going bankrupt—we’ve seen municipalities and states default before. Dysfunction [...]

Folks, the July national jobs report comes out tomorrow, and, as usual, all eyes will be on the numbers within. As you’ll recall, June’s figures were disappointing to say the least, and as a result, there’s not a lot of consensus on what tomorrow will bring. Non-farm payroll expectations on the low end are in [...]

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 [...]