Market comments for Aug. 2nd

First, an apology for not posting the past few days during our Debt Ceiling crisis. My computer crashed 4 days ago and I had it looked at and found out I had a bad Video card and board. It is in repair being replaced. Normally it would cost $1,000 to fix, but because it is a manufacturers problem, I am getting it fixed for free! Hooray! Thank you Apple! The last post I made was from my cell phone.

I wanted to comment about yesterday's low ISM Manufacturing number at -0.2% and today's Personal Spending number at -0.2%. Both of these numbers show a trend that is not good and plays off the 2nd quarter GDP number, which was very low coming in at a 1.3% reading. Also disturbing was the revision to 1st quarter at a 0.4% reading. So that was 1/2 of the year with an average GDP of 0.6%. What makes this important is that it shows we are standing still in this economy, at best, and may be slipping back into a recession. The low ISM adds more evidence as does a low Personal Spending. And we evaluate the level of debt we have in terms of a percentage of GDP. So if GDP goes down, our debt level looks worse.

WE will be getting a read on the July Unemployment rate at the end of the week and it doesn't look good for a reduction in the Unemployment rate as we had 4 weeks above 400K Initial Jobless Claims. Yes, we are going to have the Debt Ceiling raised but what a mess it was to watch. And it proved we are so divided as a country now, there is little hope for a bipartisan plan for future reductions.