johan's Journal

...my prediction of the magic number from the US BLS April unemployment report was high; turns out it went up another 0.4% again rather than 0.6%. Of course this is still bad news, despite the fact that most of the mainstream media seemed to be spinning it as "the rate of job loss may be slowing." Unemployment is still quite bad, though. If the unemployment rate increases at 0.3% for each of the remaining nine months of 2009, it will be 11.6% by January of 2010, which would be gruesome.

I think the last few months of 2009 year will be really telling. Though i'm starting to wonder that when the U.S. economy does start to improve, it may take another hit as the safe-haven investors* start to pull their money out of U.S. Treasury bills, and other U.S. investments, and put it back overseas, in Euros or developing economies. And then there's the inflationary effect of the U.S. Treasury printing all this money, which will become all too real should the U.S. economy start to recover. Not that the U.S. economy could be considered to be recovering yet, by any stretch of the imagination.

So still plenty of prospects for Doom, at least from the perspective in my strange little corner of "reality."

*This isn't that weird of an idea, mainstream media has been attributing the sunrising increase in the U.S. dollar's value to safe-haven investors for some time.

I'm gonna guess we see a 0.6% increase, to 9.1%. The BLS should publish the numbers tomorrow.

On the 22nd of April, the Washington Post reported that,"In its latest World Economic Outlook, the IMF said the global economy would likely contract 1.3 percent this year in the deepest post-World War Two recession by far."

...and then:

The IMF said the United States remains at the epicenter of the crisis, and it said it now expected the U.S. economy to contract 2.8 percent this year. It said while there were signs the U.S. recession might be easing, a recovery was unlikely to take hold until next year, which would leave 2010 gross domestic product flat.

If the IMF is simply pointing out the relatively obvious: that the world and U.S. economies will continue to contract for the next 7 months, it really makes me wonder why the US market averages have been going straight up since March 10th 2009. Seems like some investors are in denial, having convinced themselves that the markets already "hit bottom," and have come back in, thinking that the markets can make another completely fanciful recovery like they did after the .bomb in 2001-2. If the IMF is right, it seems there will have to be another "correction."

I've got the pictures i took in Australia mostly cleaned up and up on the web.

More about the trip later.