Job cuts continue with over 520,000 for the month on January. With all the complaining about losing jobs in manufacturing, there is still job loss in the service sector, though it appears to be slowing in this sector, which is a good sign. Still, the consumer fumes as we hear about another financial institution who took bailout money and paid out huge bonuses or other wasteful uses of badly needed funding. Meredith Whitney an Oppenheimer & Co. analyst made a statement today that I say on Bloomberg.com where she mentions that people take Wall Street jobs for the pay, and if we cut or eliminate bonuses we are sending the wrong message and " . . . they're going to go somewhere else." WHERE - do these people have a clue!?!?!? This is called basic supply and demand, I don't know if Meredith fell asleep during this lecture in her economics class - probably as it appears only executives in the financial industry can't seem to understand this concept! There is NO WHERE else for them to go! SUPPY & DEMAND - let them get mad and take their toys somewhere else - who has the money to pay - NO ONE!
It is the financial executives, the top echelon brokers, etc. that helped get us in this mess with the large dollars. President Obama is proposing a $500,000 limit on CEO compensation for these firms. Shouldn't that be enough money - the argument could be, "well, they could make more in other industries, so we will lose them . . ." --- exactly WHO would we care about losing???? Who kept their company, stockholders and customers out of harms way during this mess??? Again, no one! Please don't waste my time!
As for the markets themselves, not much happening in the way of direction. We have a couple of days up and a couple of days down! I still like consumer cyclicals, big pharma, certain technologies and any commodity plays. I think it will take all year for this market to stabilize and get some direction that resembles UP!
