Daily Pfenning - 8-7-2009

http://www.dailypfennig.com/

"...Yesterday, the Weekly Initial Jobless Claims printed, what I think is a worse than expected number... The media however, looked at it differently... Here's the skinny... The Claims filed last week hit 550,000, and were expected to be as bad as 580,000, which is why the media began firing off headlines about Jobless Claims falling... And that's fine... But the thing that caught my eye was the rot on the Continuing Claims part of the data... This is the number of people who are unemployed and are currently receiving unemployment benefits, and that number jumped to 6,310,000... That's over 6 million people that are still receiving unemployment benefits, it does not count those that have had their benefits expire... It's not a pretty picture, folks...

And... This might give you an idea of the total unemployed... The number of Americans receiving food stamps pushed to a new record-high in May... 34.4 million people, or one in nine Americans received food stamps, and this was the 6th consecutive month on increases, so we have June and July to catch up with here... UGH!..."

"...Cash for Clunkers or CARS program got $2 Billion more yesterday... This is being hailed as a great program to get Americans buying more fuel efficient cars, while euthanizing their old cars, and stimulating the economy... Apparently, dealers are running out of inventory... That sure seems to be strange to me... Here's what I think is going on... People trade in cars for new cars all the time... According to Edmunds.com, Americans would have traded in about 200,000 clunker-type vehicles in a typical three-month period. So... Have we just taken that 3-month period and crammed it into two weeks to take advantage of the CARS program? For an industry that was expecting to sell about 10 million cars and trucks this year, that's a 0.5 percent sales boost. I don't see the euphoria... But then I'm not trading in a car right now!..."