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--- Begin Message --- -Caveat Lector- The Scotsman, 9 January 2004
Bad Jobs Report Halts Wall's Street Rally
A bad jobs report today halted Wall Streetâs 2004 rally, sending stocks sharply lower as investors cashed in profits from the marketâs recent advance.
Regulatory problems for IBM and downgrades of telecommunications stocks also pulled prices lower.
Barry Berman, head trader for Robert W. Baird & Co. in Milwaukee, noted that the market held up relatively well through the day despite the early morning Labor Department report of anaemic job growth in December.
But late in the day, âinvestors threw in the towel ... and everyone was taking profits,â Berman said.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell 133.55, or 1.3%, to 10,458.89, and the Standard & Poorâs 500 index was off 10.06, or 0.9%, at 1,121.86.
The Nasdaq composite index, which had spent much of the day in positive territory, closed down 13.33, or 0.6%, at 2,086.92. The decline ended a five-session advance.
Despite Fridayâs performance, all the indexes were up for the week. The Dow advanced 0.5%, the S&P rose 1.2% and the Nasdaq was up 4%.
The markets took little comfort from the Bush administration announcement that it was lowering the national terror alert level to âyellowâ from âorange.â Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said that an urgent threat had passed.
Before the market opened, the Labor Department said the nationâs unemployment rate dropped to 5.7% in December, but that companies added only 1,000 new jobs in an anaemic holiday-hiring performance. Analysts had been expecting a gain of 100,000 to 150,000.
Although Decemberâs unemployment rate was the lowest in 14 months, it reached that level because fewer people were looking for work, the department said. More than 300,000 people gave up their search for jobs and dropped out of the pool of available workers, the department said.
Job creation is watched closely as a measure of the depth of the economic recovery from the 2001 recession and of consumer finances. Consumer spending makes up two-thirds of the economy.
Charles H. Blood Jr., senior financial markets analyst at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York, said, âthe market took the employment report badly at the start.â
He noted, however, that the jobs figures were at odds with other reports of economic expansion.
âTwo months in a row like this would raise a real question,â Blood said.
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