Market comments for April 28th

Yesterday, Fed Chairman Bernanke had the first ever News Conference for the Federal Reserve, which was not covered by many cable stations like CNN, as they were consumed by the news the President released his long form birth certificate, but nevertheless Bernanke made some news to me. We have been told for a long time that the recovery is "Moderate, but Main St. doesn't believe it. It seems very slow to Main St. So during yesterday's news conference , several times Bernanke commented that the "recovery" was moderate and moments later called the "recovery" slow. So all this time over the past 6 months to a year, the Fed was using language to imply the economy was growing faster than we all knew was false, but more encouraging to those on Wall St. who wanted to believe it was faster than we all experienced on Main St. Today's release of the GDP numbers and the Initial Unemployment Claims verify that the Emperor has had no clothes on.

Initial Jobless Claims released today showed that 429K new claims were filled against an expectation of 390K Initial jobless Claims. That make now several weeks in a row where these claims have exceeded 400K. Last week the number came in at a revised 404K Initial Claims. And the week before, on April 14th that it was 412K. Not since April 2nd have the claims been below 400K, coming in at 390K.

GDP numbers released today for Q1 came in at only 1.8% versus the prior period reading of 3.1%, which shows the economy is in a very significant slowing. In order to have more jobs for the unemployed, we need about a 4% GDP. Also, having a low GDP number is bad for the debt we carry, because overall debt % is compared to % GDP to determine whether we can pay back our debt as promised.

Today's numbers were not good no matter all the hype you hear to the contrary. The Dow Futures are down this morning following the data release.