07 Aug 2009 Climbing the “Wall of Worry”

The best news of the week comes today as the Labor Department says that job losses are slowing. Payrolls fell by 247,000 workers, after a 443,000 loss in June. The jobless rate dropped to 9.4% from 9.5% last month. It is the clearest sign yet that the worst recession since the Great Depression is coming to an end if it has not already ended. Stocks jumped on the news taking the S&P 500 to a new high since the March 9^th low. The index is now up more than 50% since that watershed day when Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit told employees in an internal memo that the bank was having its best quarter since 2007 as well as comments from regulators suggesting that they might reinstate rules to limit short selling. Nearly $4 trillion in value has been returned to investors during this timeframe.