Last week’s news that the unemployment rate is soaring wasn’t met with surprise; but what is news is how many educated and employable people are jumping on the jobless bandwagon. As the Economix blog smartly reports, the number of college graduates with jobs fell 282,000 last month - but just 2,000 of them have looked for a job in the last four weeks. So why are 280,000 educated and unemployed moving from Midtown to Slowdown?  It’s a hard fall from Wall Street to the workforce, and fired financiers are no different from the rest of us; its tough to find a job in Christmastime. 

So what are all those idle bankers betting on this holiday season?  Well, depends which bank fired them!

Citigroup - Abercrombie and Fitch (NYSE:ANF)

We all know the kind of guy that goes to work at Citigroup - he wore the polo shirt with the collar

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Thanks to Gary, who contributed this comment on a post about the Baltic Dry Index a week ago -

“What great time to buy shipping stocks - before you know it demand will be back because pent-up demand will force products to ship. Stocks like Genco (GNK) and others will expode again.”

  View the full GNK chart at Wikinvest

Not sure about the “explosion” you’re anticipating, Gary, but I’ve got to agree with you on this point - demand for the dry bulk shippers will be back. Dry bulk goods, like metals and grains, are the foundation of economic growth - and even as the world’s economy shrinks in the short term, its population (and corresponding demand for food, energy, and consumer products) continue to grow in the long term.

If only I had paid attention to Gary’s advice on Friday afternoon and pulled the trigger on a dry bulk

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It seems like the wrong time to be buying stocks right now, considering that every day the market hits a new bottom. On Thursday, markets closed at their lowest point in nearly six years, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average finishing the day at 7,552.29. And its not just stocks that are hurting; oil is below $50 a barrel and 30-day Treasury bonds are yielding less than 1% as investors demand safe havens for their money…its ugly on Wall Street, and people’s savings on Main Street have felt the pain.

But smart investors know that when the market looks bleak, opportunity abounds. Plummeting stock prices means that your existing holdings are dragging, but it also means those stocks you’ve been watching for months are ripe for the picking. But which ones to hone in on, when it seems like every stock on the market

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One of the lesser-known fundamentals underpinning the global economy is the Baltic Dry Index, a benchmark that measures dry-bulk shipping rates.  Dry bulk goods include the most commonly used raw materials, like grains, coal, and metals.  When global economies are booming, demand for these inputs (and the ships to transport them) fuels high day rates for companies like DryShips (NDAQ:DRYS) to transport these goods across the world’s oceans.  

    View the full BALDRY chart at Wikinvest

The Baltic Dry Index (BDI) tracks rates in the 22 main shipping routes for these key inputs.  The BDI has plummeted in the past several months, as the U.S. financial crisis has snowballed into a global economic downturn and the consumption of raw materials has ground to a halt.  For example, China is the world’s biggest consumer of steel, but it has cut its consumption as infrastructure projects

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Last week, things looked bleak for equity investors.  As the Dow Jones and S&P 500 slid to historic lows, and the TED spread soared to a historic high (more on that below), it looked to many like the thing to do was pull out of stocks entirely, and enter safer assets like gold, T-bills, and steady bank savings accounts.  But on Monday, the market bounced, led by the news that the U.S. government will invest up to $250 billion to shore up the U.S. banking system in a plan similar to measures taken by several European powers, including Germany and the U.K.

Does this mean the crisis is over, and stocks will recover the trillions of dollars in market cap they lost over the past two weeks?  Unlikely.  Events of the past several months have shown that each time the market rebounds, a fresh bit of disheartening

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On Tuesday, Deutsche Telekom AG unveiled the first smart phone that will use Google’s new Android operating system.  The device is called the G1, sold by Deutsche Telekom’s subsidiary T-Mobile, and it looks a lot like the iPhone and other competing smart phones (well, except for the Google logo on the back).  But its the software, not the hardware, that T-Mobile and Google hope will set this new product apart. It will need to be special to crack the dominance of RIMM’s Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone in the smart phone market.  Those two companies controlled a combined 65% of the market in 2008, ahead of a long list of competitors that also includes PALM, Motorola, LG, and Samsung.

But smart phone users are savvy folks, and they’re looking for devices that will make life more efficient, and more enjoyable.  That’s where the cache of Google’s

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As the WSJ reported today, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America is just the latest chapter in a stunning redesign of the financial world.  Stand-alone investment banks are dying rapid deaths, with three down in 2008 already (who can forget the spectacular demise of Bear Stearns?).  In their place, a new king is rising - commercial banks.

The key difference between an investment bank and a commercial bank is the source of their cash flow.  A commercial bank like Bank of America or Wachovia takes consumer deposits, which are insured by the federal government to prevent depositors from pulling out all at once (a major catalyst of the Great Depression in the 1930s that is now prevented by tighter regulation and insurance).  Investment banks take no such deposits, and as a result benefit from lighter government

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The government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will have far-reaching economic effects.  For example, hedge funds that bet against the two companies have already seen windfall profits as the stock prices of both companies plummeted over the weekend, while the financial institutions that invested in the nearly $5 trillion in mortgages and mortgage-backed securities that FNM and FRE guarantee can breathe a sigh of relief.  The government bailout should help avoid a global financial crisis - but it might not help all of the Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) that depend on loans from Fannie and Freddie to finance their growth.

REITs are corporations that pool investor capital to purchase either income property or mortgage loans.  An example of the former is Simon Property Group (NYSE:SPG), which owns strip malls and shopping centers throughout the United States.  The latter group includes companies like Annaly Capital

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The problems plaguing the Big Three American auto makers in 2008 have been well-documented.  The push for flashy SUVs that guzzle gas but impress at the suburban strip mall caused Ford, GM, and Daimler to shift production towards these bigger cars, but these divisions have become huge drains on profits in recent quarters.  Consumers have responded to the explosion of oil and gas prices and stopped buying trucks and sport utility vehicles, looking instead toward more fuel-efficient and hybrid vehicles.

Europe drank the renewable energy Kool-Aid long before it reached America, and the big car companies have already focused their European and international production on smaller cars that consume less gasoline.  As the global economy sags, these economical cars have continued to sell, and results abroad have been the lone bright spot for Ford, GM, and lower-profile players in the auto manufacturing industry.

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Reason for comment Niogold announced encouraging new assays from its 2008 drilling programme at the Wedge zone on the Marban Block property in Quebec. The results from nine holes show gold values typical of the Wedge zone, where high-grade zones exist within lengthier intervals of lower-grade mineralisation. The best result came from hole MB08-051, where Niogold encountered a 14.8-metre interval averaging 3.10 grams of gold per tonne. Within that zone was a 3.1-metre interval that averaged 9.8 grams of gold per tonne. Hole MB08-052 yielded several higher-grade zones, each within lengthier intersections of low-grade rock. Notably, a 28.4-metre interval that averaged 1.68 grams per tonne contained two 1.2-metre zones, averaging 13.4 grams and 12.9 grams of gold per tonne. Other higher-grade zones in this hole yielded 17.9 grams of gold per tonne over 1.1 metres and 8.56 grams of gold per tonne over 1.2 metres. Five other holes produced high-grade intersections, typically over intervals ...