This morning's job numbers reinforced my belief that the U.S. economy will not double dip into a recession, but that the economy will continue to expand at a slow rate. The jobs data released portrayed economic growth of 2%-3%, which is not great by any means but positive nonetheless. Jobs openings in September rose by 225,000 and openings as a percentage of total employment is now at the highest levels in 3 years...high unemployment is one of the headwinds I've written about. While the new jobs openings number is definitely good, it is still below the average number that we've seen in previous economic expansions - BUT, it's a start.
The markets are trading flat to slightly down as fears of financial instability have now shifted from Greece to Italy. It appears that the Italian financial system is also struggling as Greece's was, and for some reason investors are surprised about these developments (remember I've written about this quite a lot and even talked about some of the other countries in the EU that are also facing similar problems - Portugal, Spain, etc).
Other than monitoring these news events, I'm doing little as I'm waiting for the "right pitch" to come along before I start to shift my portfolio's to a more aggressive manner. As I wrote yesterday, I'm becoming more positive on the outlook for the U.S. economy and the stock market in general.
