By Dan Denning
Like a character that refuses to die in a bad horror movie, the U.S. job market posted some shocking June numbers. It has revived the dormant nightmare that this may be a long "L" shaped recession. Or even worse, a double-dipper, with the second dip just getting started.
The U.S. Labor Department Reported that around 467,000 Americans lost their jobs in June. This was unwelcome news. The data had been getting less bad every month since January. Then the June numbers rocked up, fell out, and took stocks down with them. This is causing everyone with a pulse (and most with a brain) to have second thoughts.
The S&P and the Dow both fell nearly three percent. Oil and Gold were down too. About the only thing up were Treasury bonds and notes. Speaking of which, the U.S. will auction another $73 billion of those next week. Wednesday's auction is for $19 billion in ten-year notes while $11 billion in 30-year bonds go on sale Thursday.
The Aussie futures are pointing to an open about two percent lower on the S&P ASX/200. And why wouldn't they? If the jobless rate in American-9.5%--has reached a 26-year high, might that mean Australia's labour market (the whole economy even) is in danger of swooning again?
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"You may have green shoots, whatever you want to call them, you may have temporary relief, but you are still in a world that's breaking," Black Swan author Nassim Taleb told CNBC's Squawk Box. "Anything that's fragile like the financial system will eventually crash, he said...We're in the middle of a crash...So if I'm going to forecast something, it is that it's going to get worse, not better."
Taleb's point is not a popular one. But it is a realistic one. The fiat money, leveraged finance Western financial system went global in the last twenty years, providing an epic rise in asset prices (and the debt used to purchase them). There's no doubt that real goods and services have traded hands with world growth. But now we wonder how much of that is sustainable when you take the credit away.
Did we use phoney money to build a world with completely unrealistic levels of growth? Were trillions of dollars of capital allocated based on final demand that was artificially pumped up by credit, currency manipulation (low U.S. interest rates and global dollar pegging), and government stimulation?
Yes we did!
Mind you, the crash of the financial system is not the end of the world. It is a massive calamity to be sure, wiping out the value of retirement assets many people were counting on to make it through their golden years. But as many readers have reminded us in the last few months, there is more to life than money.
Fair enough. But there is more to wealth than money too! Peace of mind, having your assets in forms that can't be inflated away or won't suffer from debt deflation...we would count these as "wealth" at a time like this.
