Dow pulled back 215, decliners over advancers 2-1 & NAZ was off 41. The MLP index fell 1+ to the 208s & the REIT index drifted lower to 485. Junk bond funds continued weak & Treasuries were hit with selling after recent buying. Oil crawled higher in the 96s & gold gained 15 to 1938.
AMJ (Alerian MLP index tracking fund)
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The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits last week tumbled to the lowest level in more than ½ a century, the latest evidence of an increasingly tight labor market. The Labor Dept reported that applications last week dropped to 166K from the revised 171K a week earlier, easily beating the 200K forecast. It marked the lowest level for jobless claims since 1968. Continuing claims, or the number of Americans who are consecutively receiving unemployment aid, rose slightly to 1.54M, up by 17K from the previous week's revised level. One year ago, nearly 4M Americans were receiving unemployment benefits. Claims have hovered around historic lows as the economy continues to recover & Americans ramp up their spending levels. Unprecedented levels of gov spending & a speedy vaccine rollout helped to jumpstart the US economy, which expanded 5.7% in 2021. Businesses have struggled to keep up with the demand, however & have reported difficulties in onboarding new employees. This report suggests that companies are making an effort to retain the workers they already have. There were roughly 1.8 job openings for every unemployed worker in Feb, according to a gov report that tracks job openings. The number of available jobs has topped 10M for 7 consecutive months; before the pandemic began in February 2020, the highest on record was 7.7M.
Jobless claims tumble to lowest level in more than 50 years
St Louis Federal Reserve Pres James Bullard said the central bank remains well behind in its fight to cool the hottest inflation in 4 decades. Bullard
was the lone dissenter in Mar, when the Fed voted to hike the
benchmark federal funds rate by 25-basis points for the first time since
2018, bringing to an end the ultra-easy monetary policy put in place to
prop up the economy throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. He
believed the central bank needed to more aggressively raise rates by a ½ percentage point & begin unwinding its nearly $9T balance
sheet.
Fed official warns central bank still seems 'behind the curve' on inflation
The EU;s proposed ban on coal imports from Russia is not expected to take full effect until Aug — a month later than expected, 2 sources said. Earlier this week, the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, proposed the ban in the wake of mounting evidence of atrocities by Russian troops against Ukrainians in Bucha & other areas. The original plan was to phase out coal imports within 3 months, an EU official said. However, the official added that this period had now been extended to 4 months — bringing the full implementation of the ban to Aug. "There seems to have been an effective German lobby to extend the phase out period for existing coal contracts to four months," a 2nd EU official confirmed. Germany is one of the most skeptical nations when it comes to blocking energy supplies from Russia, but it's not the only one. Austria & Hungary, for instance, are questioning it too. These nations have the highest energy dependencies on Russia &d argue that banning energy supplies from the country could have a bigger impact on their own economies than on Russia's. Germany, for instance, bought 21.5% of its coal from Russia in 2020. That number rose to 35.2% for oil imports & to 58.9% for natural gas, according to data from the European statistics office.
EU not expected to fully ban Russian coal imports until August, sources say
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