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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (27877)	7/29/1999 12:24:00 PM
From: The Perfect Hedge	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50167

IQ-- What support are you looking for on the ndx now? Thanks..B*

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (27877)	7/30/1999 4:32:00 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Respond to of 50167

ECI-- another opinion from Fortune.. to get to the basis within real time is the onus of the thread.. we go back and look to what experts have to say next day on ECI, Idea covered it within a trading day..it is nice to see like our calls the analysis is realistic.. GREENIE'S FAVORITE INDICATOR... Let's start with that pesky indicator, the employment cost index, or ECI, which caused today's downer. Few figures attract the scrutinizing eye of The Chairman, Alan Greenspan, more than the ECI. Today, the Commerce Department (and can't you just see the career bureaucrats who harvest these figures tittering with glee at the market impact their number crunching labors will cause?) reported that the ECI, a broad measure of employment costs that include wages and benefits, spiked upward 1.1% in the second quarter, blowing away the expectation of an less than 1% performance. Rick Egelton, an economy wizard with the Bank of Montreal, tells me that this was the largest jump, as measured quarterly, since 1991. And since rising wages are a harbinger of inflation, well, you can see why the markets freaked. Yet, Egelton, (who, with the comforting detachment of an economist, seemed amused at the Street's gyrations today) says there's nothing to worry about. Why? Well, for quarter after quarter after quarter the ECI has unnaturally been chiming benignly -- in the first three months of the year it registered a meek .4% -- even as unemployment has fallen to a beautiful 4.3%. Egelton says it's amazing that growing demand for labor had not pushed the ECI up sooner. So now that the darn figure has struck a shrill note, it's really, truly, perfectly natural that it's done so; it's been a long time coming. "Today we saw a high increase and that caused concern," says Egelton. "But economists have been scratching their heads over how wage costs have been so well contained over the last few years."