Morning Market Report

There's several pieces of news from the jobs' front. First, here's the bad news. The weekly first time jobless claims unexpectedly rose to 551,000 from 534,000 the week prior. That number had been trending down for the previous three weeks. The four week average is still the lowest since January. Meanwhile, a separate report shows a drop in planned layoffs in September. That number dropped to 66,404 from 76,456 in August. The monthly jobs report comes out tomorrow morning at 8:30 AM ET. The consensus number is a loss of about 225,000 jobs for the month of September.

All major domestic indices were down yesterday. The Dow lost .31%, the S&P 500 lost .33%, and the NASDAQ lost .08%. Futures are showing more slight weakness. All three indices look to open down but currently less than a quarter of a percent each. Bonds continue to show more strength. The ten year U.S. Treasury bond is now at a new five month low. It's currently trading at 3.27%. That's the lowest it's been since May. The spread between the two and ten year has widened a bit. That's now at 3.36% as the two year showed significant strength yesterday.

Market indices around the world were down universally. Markets are closed in China for their founding. Meanwhile, the NIKKEI in Japan was down 1.53%, the Straits Time Index in Singapore was down .57%. All indices in the Far East joined the NIKKEI and the STI down. In Europe, the news wasn't much better. The FTSE in London was down .4%, the DAX in Germany was down .18% and the Spanish index was down .64%. The Italian index was up .01% and was the only major index in either Europe or the Far East to finish up.

The Dollar is trading in a relatively mild range against the world's major indices. It's up .51% against the Euro, down .04% against the British Pound, and down .12% against the Japanese Yen.