Highest Unemployment Rate Ever?!? Nobody Cares! Buy! Buy! Buy!
Another week. Another astounding initial unemployment claims figure. Another boffo contrarian market response.
At the time of writing, the US markets are up another 1.4 baffling percentage points on what seems to be the ultimate crypto move by the Fed. Today, they perfectly timed a refinement of an announcement of an announcement that was already made.
Why was it perfectly timed? Well, it was timed to come out right after the weekly jobless claims figures were reported by the Department of Labor!
If you're keeping score at home, that's 16.78 million new fresh job losses in the past 3 weeks alone. No, it's not an average of the three numbers. Each number is a whole new set of unemployed people.
If we extrapolate this number a couple weeks out (and we assume NO new initial unemployment claims in those same weeks), then we are already at somewhere between 12-13% unemployment rate. That's already higher than the Great Recession.
The highest peak I can find in the data on Google Explorer is 10.8% unemployment rate in December 1982.
How in the hell can the stock market be up so big with the potential for the largest unemployment rate in recent history on deck by the end of this month?
There is only one explanation:
How can we buy of we don't have enough money used to buy stock.
Sarcasm, bro, sarcasm