With jitters about Europe far from over, ever more analysts intoning the prospects of a "double-dip recession" that only the most pessimistic of pessimists was suggesting two months ago, and with the debt-ceiling pact pointing to less government spending, the generally better than expected but still not good job numbers announced by the Department of Labor this morning haven't been enough to quell market volatility after nearly two weeks of downward spiraling. Where today's DJIA and other indices will wind up is anybody's guess.
One reason the market started out stronger and then bounced around mostly in negative territory may be that traders got a better look beneath the headline numbers of the jobs report once the Bureau of Labor Statistics got its computer servers back on line after a crash.
While the hiring news was comparatively better than in May and June, whose job numbers were themselves revised upward, the reason the unemployment rate dropped to 9.1 percent was because another 38,000 people left the labor force. As Jeff Cox noted, there was a huge spike in the number of discouraged workers, from 982,000 to 1.19 million.
That, like so many aspects of the economy, is hardly something to cheer about. But apparently, just before 1 PM ET, the market had found something to give it smiles.
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