{"id":2069,"date":"2020-08-14T11:23:49","date_gmt":"2020-08-14T11:23:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/?p=2069"},"modified":"2020-11-18T09:32:56","modified_gmt":"2020-11-18T09:32:56","slug":"market-update-14th-august-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/2020\/08\/14\/market-update-14th-august-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Market Update \u2013 14th August 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wpb-content-wrapper\"><div class=\"vc_row wpb_row vc_row-fluid\">\n<div class=\"wpb_column vc_column_container vc_col-sm-12\">\n<div class=\"vc_column-inner \">\n<div class=\"wpb_wrapper\">\n<div class=\"wpb_raw_code wpb_content_element wpb_raw_html\">\n<div class=\"wpb_wrapper\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EOFHm6RLM88?rel=0&amp;wmode=transparent\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"vc_row wpb_row vc_row-fluid\">\n<div class=\"wpb_column vc_column_container vc_col-sm-12\">\n<div class=\"vc_column-inner \">\n<div class=\"wpb_wrapper\">\n<div class=\"wpb_text_column wpb_content_element \">\n<div class=\"wpb_wrapper\">\n<p>Yesterday\u2019s (13 August 2020) US jobless claims data came in much better than expected.<\/p>\n<p>Initial jobless claims for the week ending Saturday 8 August 2020, fell below the 1m mark for the first time since mid-March (20 weeks ago), with a reading of 963,000, while continuing claims for the week ending Saturday 1 August 2020, fell just over 600,000 to 15.49m (the lowest reading since Saturday 4 April 2020).<\/p>\n<p>As a reminder, initial jobless claims data shows how many Americans have filed an \u2018initial\u2019 claim for unemployment benefits during that week.\u00a0 They then have to begin filing a \u2018continuing\u2019 claim in order to keep getting benefits for that week of unemployment \u2013 and this, by definition, means the data has to be one week behind initial claims.<\/p>\n<p>While we can\u2019t deny that these numbers are high given the reality is nearly 1m Americans lost their job in the first week of August (which is around 5 times the \u2018normal\u2019 level we saw before the coronavirus outbreak) and over 15m Americans are still claiming benefits, we do feel vindicated given the majority of economists and market commentators have recently been claiming that both the employment and the economic recovery were starting to reverse \u2013 whereas the ongoing downward trend in jobless claims encouragingly confirms to us that the employment market is still recovering.\u00a0 Furthermore, we believe that the US employment market and economy will continue to recover as new coronavirus cases in the US continue to slow, which is allowing US states to restart the lifting of their lockdown restrictions.<\/p>\n<p>We have repeatedly said that although we would suffer a deep and painful recession, it would not be like a normal downturn as this recession has been caused by governments voluntarily shutting their economies (as opposed to central banks tightening monetary policy, or due to financial crisis, like 2008\/9) \u2013 and as such, the downturn would be short, and thanks to the unprecedented government and central bank stimulus, we would see a sharp economic acceleration on the other side of this horrible coronavirus outbreak (i.e. a V-shaped economic recovery).<\/p>\n<p>However, there are still lots of things for us to be nervous about as ironically, this strong data means the US political stalemate is likely to continue as it takes the pressure off both the Republicans and Democrats to agree a new US fiscal stimulus package to help hard-hit Americans.<\/p>\n<p>As a consequence both the Dow Jones and the S&amp;P 500 indices closed down last night:\u00a0 the Dow Jones fell just over 80 points, or 0.29%, and the S&amp;P 500 ended the day down 0.20%. \u00a0This, coupled with the UK\u2019s new quarantine rules, has unfortunately hurt the FTSE-100 this morning \u2013 and as we write the index is trading just over 140 points lower, or 2.3%, with travel and leisure related stocks among the worst performers.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Investment Management<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n  <\/div> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday\u2019s (13 August 2020) US jobless claims data came in much better than expected. Initial jobless claims for the week ending Saturday 8 August 2020, fell [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2069"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2069"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2133,"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2069\/revisions\/2133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.wealthatwork.co.uk\/jpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}