Well, it’s Thursday, and that means that it’s new jobless claims day.

We are actually in a place where we can see the seasonally adjusted statistics have meaning, because we are past the auto plant shutdown in the dog days of Summer that actually happened in the spring.

Initial claims were 545,000, down 12,000 from last week’s upwardly revised 557,000, a drop of 12,000, but remember that if we compare initial numbers to initial numbers, we were at 550,000 last week, so the drop is only 5,000, not 12,000…..Anyone see a pattern?

The 4 week moving average, which is a less noisy metric, fell from 8,750 to 563,000, but note that anything at 400K or above is still bad news territory.

Continuing claims rose by 129K to 6.2 million, and that does not account for people who are exhausting their benefits.

As CR notes (link on graph pr0n) the fed has reported that household net worth has fallen $12.2 trillion, or about $40,000.00 for every man woman and child in the United States.

Of course the financial journalist are reporting that household net worth is up for the first time since Q3 of 2007, but this is almost entirely the recent bump in stock prices, which primarily benefits the top decile.

Still, we are seeing good news, with housing starts and the Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Index both showing improvement.

Of course, part of this has to do with the fact that mortgage rates are way down, because the Federal Reserve is buying mortgage backed securities like they are going out of style, in order to keep those rates low.

I would also note that there just are not that many consumers out there. The UK again being a case in point. Yesterday, I mentioned that their unemployment had spiked, and today we discover that their retail sales fell 0.2%, as opposed to the forecast increase of o.1%.

People without jobs cannot buy stuff.

That’s why the Bank of Japan decided to keep its benchmark rate at essentially 0%, actually 0.1%, but that’s a f%$#ing rounding error.

In energy, oil fell slightly, to 72.47/bbl.

In currency, the dollar took a hit today, falling against both the Euro and yen, and the Canadian dollar rose to an 11 month high.