Doom And Gloom

Marts drop on jobs report, but bigger issues loom
Two very bad and extremely dangerous economic developments happened yesterday — and Wall Street appeared to miss both of them.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 40.86 points to 14565.25 after the Labor Department announced that the seasonally adjusted number of new jobs created in March was just 88,000 — far below the 190,000 or so Wall Street expected.

The March figure was also less than one-third the number of jobs created during February.

This led to the misperception that the job market tanked in March.

It didn’t.

Remember that April is the month when the market often begins major selloffs as professional investors get a jump on the “sell in May and go away” lesson that has served them well in recent years.
And in early April the market isn’t artificially propped up by the end-of-the-month manipulation, led by money managers who want their clients to think they are doing a good job — or by options-expiration week shenanigans.

So why weren’t March’s job figures as bad as Wall Street thought they were?

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