The Sun’s Financial Diary

Despite signs that the economy has started to recover, U.S. employers continued to cut workers.
In the latest employment report released this morning, the Labor Department said nonfarm payroll shrank by another 263,000 in September, pushing the monthly unemployment rate to 9.8%, the highest level since June 1983.

In September, the employment in construction fell 63,000 while [...]

In case you forgot, today, July 24, 2009, the Federal minimum wage goes up to $7.25/hour from last year’s $6.55/hour.
Following is a plot of historical Federal minimum wages from 1939 to 2009 (the blue line). In 1939, the minimum wage was only 30 cents. The next adjustment didn’t come until 1945 when the minimum wage [...]

The labor market is still weak, but there’s little hope that the situation may start to improve as the pace of job cut slowed in April.
The Labor Department reported today that U.S. employers trimmed 539,000 nonfarm jobs in April 2009, the smallest monthly decline since October 2008, after ADP data showed similar decline early this [...]

The Commerce Department yesterday released U.S. Personal Income and Outlays for December 2008. Among the published data, the one that caught my attention was personal savings rate. According to the report, personal savings rose to $378.6 billion in December from $299.1 billion in November. In terms of percentage, personal savings rate in December is 3.6%. [...]

No relief insight for home owners and it’s going to be particularly hard for anyone who wants to sell the house in this market.
According to the S&P/Case-Shiller Index published today, U.S. existing single family home prices plunged a record 18.2% year-over-year in November after a similar drop in the October survey.

The Composite-10 Index which covers [...]

From the rates point of view only, now may be the time to shop for a new mortgage or refinance your existing mortgage.
Freddie Mac today released its Weekly Primary Mortgage Market Survey, which showed that average rates of 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has dropped to a new low at 4.96% from 5.01% a week ago, the [...]

Has the housing market bottomed?
It doesn’t look like so, at least not from what we can see from the S&P/Case-Shiller Index. Standard & Poors today leased its S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index for October 2008 which shows a 18% plunge of U.S. residential home prices in the past 12 months.

The index has fallen every month since [...]