Today was Empire State manufacturing...it followed the pattern of the last 6 weeks in showing deterioration in almost every economic data point domestically. Very strangely all the regional mfg data has been poor but the one report people most focus in the manufacturing space - ISM Manufacturing - came in strong. A total outlier. This caused a massive dislocation in markets as you expect when 8 data points to be similar...the 9th to confirm. It did not happen. Tomorrow comes Philly Fed which is most parallel in terms of forecasting ISM Mfg historically....except last month of course when they wildly diverged.
But that is mid morning Thursday...by now you should see how much of our rallies since March 09 come premarket. Many times stocks cannot break thru key technical levels during the day but burst through them premarket when trading is even more thin. So will tomorrow premarket do the trick as weekly jobless claims get us over the hump? Even more fascinating, recall last week 9 states (including the largest - CA) did not report actual weekly claims due to Labor Day holiday... so the print near 450K (which is *still* recessionary) was based on estimates made by either the state (in 2 cases) or federal government (7 states). You can guess how that worked out (sunny side up). So will we have revisions to last week's data?
Will anyone care? Does anything matter other than Bernanke's implicit pledge to throw gasoline on the fire once the election is over? Are bears resigned to a March 2009 - April 2010 outcome post election as Bernanke throws cash all over the globe as Greenspan/Mervyn King/Bubble Ben implicitly agree the best stimulus is higher asset prices - at any cost? Is it coincidence the market rallied almost straight from the announcement of QE1 through the end of QE1 and then stagnated for 5 months when additional QE ended? Almost literally within weeks? Or will anyone ask why such a 'recovering' and 'green shooty' economy requires so many steroids - quarter after quarter, year after year? Hmmm....
