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Strategies & Market Trends : Roger's 1998 Short Picks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pancho Villa who wrote (6105)	4/3/1998 4:45:00 PM
From: Oeconomicus	Respond to of 18691

Pancho, the explanation that the decline in jobs (funny how the reporters any analysts call it a decline in job growth, not actual jobs) is due to normal seasonal factors like winter layoffs in construction actually makes some sense... Except - didn't these geniuses know this already? Didn't they know that construction jobs didn't shrink in Jan-Feb like they usually do? Didn't they factor all that into the consensus estimate of +250,000? Seems to me that there are 286,000 fewer jobs than the economists expected. Make sense? OTOH, to take it as a real indication of a change in direction, I think we need to see some confirming data like higher jobless claims. I do think that Asia, particularly with Japan's condition worsening, will have a growing impact on the US and I'm no longer too worried about my bond fund holdings (unless, of course, Soros attacks the Chinese and they punish us by selling bonds). A fixed income manager on Squawk Box this morning was predicting an inverted yield curve and I'm inclined to agree. I don't think Greenspan wants to feed the euphoria by cutting rates, but neither do I think he will raise them (though I was hoping). The economy will slow anyway due to Asia; if he did raise them he'd risk going down in history as the man who caused the crash - here and in Japan; and if some US investor didn't go postal on him, he shouldn't travel to Japan without Secret Service. Anyway, ask a simple question... BTW, he doesn't need to raise rates to cause a crash - real rates are very high anyway and eventually investors will realize that things really are slowing down and the optimistic earnings projections for the year can't be met. I think most analysts have been leaving full year projections pretty much unchanged in spite of cutting first half numbers simply by raising the second half to offset. It won't happen. Has Abby Cohen raised her target to 10,000 yet? Cramer, on GMA this morning said 10,000 by Labor Day. Bob