Almost overlooked with this morning's big news on third quarter GDP was the unemployment claims report, which was a slight positive. Initial claims for unemployment insurance fell by 1,000 to 530,000. For a change, the previous week's numbers were not revised. The four-week moving average fell 6,000 to 526,250 and are now 132,500 below their mid-April peak. This is good news, but it is not good enough -- we really need to see another decline of that magnitude to indicate that the economy is actually adding jobs. Note that even with the decline that we are still above the highest point hit in either of the prior two recessions. Still, you have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. The graph below (from http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/) shows the history of the four-week moving average. A peak in the moving average historically has been ...

Classic Jim Rogers – obviously he is on the same train as Marc Faber in terms of printing presses on overdrive [May 15, 2009: This was a Central Bank Printing Press Rally] As with Faber, Rogers is mostly stuck on CNBC Asia or Europe… don’t want to disrupt green seeds stateside. He is not short or hedged in anything at the moment, but buying Japanese Yen. The next crisis in his eyes are currencies which makes sense since sovereign states have taken much of the bad debt from the banks and piled them onto their own balance sheets (or if you will their central banks)… i.e. toxic is taken from private parties and splayed onto the backs of the public. Capitalism! Wait, Socialism! Wait… ok… who knows what we call it … I call it Reverse Robin Hood = …

Who can honestly say he isn’t enjoying this financial crisis? It has unhorsed cavalier fund managers …it has turned the masters of the universe into servile waiters…it has made Nobel Prize winners look like morons. The rich…the proud… the pompous…the vain…the incompetent…Wall Street - surely there is a God…an ‘invisible hand’…giving them all a whack on the head!

And there are the regulators too! Under their very noses the biggest scams in history went unnoticed. America’s SEC alone - to say nothing of the countless other cops on the financial beat - had 3,371 employees playing the piano in 2006. If you can believe it, not a single one of them noticed what was going on in the back room. Even after rummaging through Bernard Madoff’s back office twice in the last three years, they still didn’t know. They must have been like pets watching an orgy…with no idea what to

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