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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (72158)	1/21/2010 3:17:41 PM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

True, GDXJ is not explicitly leveraged in the sense of a 2X fund using options/futures. However, gold stocks have defacto leverage vs. the price of gold because they get dragged down in a general market crash. Smaller cap stocks are nore volatile, so GDXJ should tend to have more leverage vs. gold if you buy at the bottom. Here are the approximate percentage drops for the last 5 days... GLD -3.5% GDX -9% GDXJ -11%

To: carranza2 who wrote (72158)	1/22/2010 3:37:21 AM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	Respond to of 74559

UUUUUPPPPP'SS NYC unemployment spikes to 10.6% The city's jobless rate is up from 7% in December 2008, and at its highest level in nearly 17 years. If you want evidence that Wall Street's rebound has lifted the local economy, you'll just have to wait. Share Print Email Comments(2) By Daniel Massey The city's unemployment rate soared to 10.6% last month from 10% in November, a sign that record Wall Street profits and hints of a national recovery have yet to reverberate through the local economy. The jobless rate in the city is up from 7% in December 2008, and is at its highest level in nearly 17 years, according to data released Thursday by the state Department of Labor. The state's unemployment rate jumped to 9% in December, from 8.6% in November, matching a 26-year high. “While there might be some recovery on Wall Street, it's not trickling down to other parts of the economy,” said James Parrott, chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute. “It's a reminder that we're still in a very serious recession and that job growth is going to be very slow to come back.” It was more than a year after the end of the last two recessions before unemployment in the city began to stabilize, noted James Brown, principal economist at the state DOL. “It's not unexpected for the unemployment rate to remain high or trend upwards even after a recession ends,” Mr. Brown said. “It takes a while before hiring ticks back up.” The city lost 9,100 jobs last month, including 5,800 private-sector positions, according to a seasonally adjusted analysis of state data by real estate services firm Eastern Consolidated. Losses were concentrated in accounting (1,400), restaurants (1,300) and retail (1,100). One bright spot: Wall Street added 600 jobs last month, continuing a multi-month trend where securities employment has been flat or up—and fueling speculation that the industry's bloodletting is in the past. “We're not really seeing heavy layoffs anymore coming out of that industry,” Mr. Brown said. Seasonal hiring in industries like retail, leisure and hospitality, and even in pockets of the New York economy like courier services, was significantly stronger than last year, but still fell well short of historical norms, DOL's Mr. Brown said. Some 18,000 seasonal hires were made between August and December, far shy of the 40,000 that are typically added to the city economy in non-recession years. At least 2009's seasonal hires outpaced 2008's dismal total of just 5,000. Since local employment peaked in August 2008, the city has lost 142,900 jobs, including 136,000 in the private sector, the Eastern Consolidated report shows. That's 3.8% of the city's total. But the near-4% drop in the total job ranks is far less than seen in the last two recessions. In those downturns, the city's losses outpaced the nation's, with an 11.2% local employment drop in the early 1990s and a 6.5% falloff in the early 2000s, according to Eastern Consolidated. This time around, Gotham has been hit less severely than the country as a whole.