We hope you all had a great Labor Day weekend! It was a busy week in the markets
Here are the top things we’re covering this week’s blog:
- The Market
- The S&P was down about 2% on the week. We have been alluding to some concerns that volatility was rising while market prices were hitting all time highs and that could be indicating some stress. This week we saw the market march higher early in the week before getting hammered on Thursday while volatility spiked. Friday finished a wild week starting significantly down early in the day before recovering much of the losses by the end of the day.
- New claims decreased last week and came in at 881,000. This is a nice move down by just over a million from last week. One concern in this area is that there were over 759,000 of initial Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Claims this week which makes that actual initial claims number to be over 1.5 million.
- Continuing claims came in around 13 million, dropping more than 1 million from the previous week. This was the brightest result in the report.
- Total Claims for Unemployment from all programs came in at over 29 million. This is on a 2-week delay from initial claims but was up over 2 million from the previous week. All of the increase can be attributed to the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that saw an increase of over 2.5 million in claims.
- We also got the ADP jobs report early in the week last week that was well below expectations and we got the BLS report on Friday that had about 1.4 million in jobs added and a drop in the unemployment rate to 8.4%. The largest category of jobs added were government jobs for the census. While we had slightly more jobs created in August than expected, the rate of growth is slowing with still may more jobs lost since March than created.
Articles of Interest
- More details on the market drop this week and what it might mean.
- How positive was the jobs report on Friday? Maybe not as good as it seems.
Social Media Post of the Week
- Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite Social Media Feeds!!
Non-Financial Story of the Week
Sometimes it is important to remember what it is like to be a kid. We were out for a walk last week and my youngest daughter decided to skip down a large hill. It was a very sweet moment seeing the carefree attitude and general happiness she had. When we got near the bottom she asked me if I could skip after she “showed me how” 😊… After I skipped for a bit, she turned to my wife and said “daddy is really catching on!” I about melted!
Check out my post on Twitter to see the video!
Bottom Line
Weeks like this remind us that the market doesn’t just go up and when it does go down, it usually happens faster than when it goes up. While we did see the markets bounce back significantly later in the day on Friday, volatility levels are still elevated. With the elections coming up I would expect more weeks like this in the coming months.
If you have any questions about any of the information in this week’s blog or what you should be doing right now with your personal and business planning, do not hesitate to reach out to us by sending an email to info@konvergentwealth.com or calling us at 253-236-7000.