Stupid Things of the Day

Front page of Bloomberg had this story:

Hiring by U.S. discount, grocery, restaurant and specialty chains in November rose to the highest level in 2009, signaling that retailers may be anticipating a gradual recovery in consumer spending, a monthly survey found.

In November, 3.87 percent of applications resulted in hires, the most this year according to seasonally adjusted figures compiled by software maker Kronos Inc. Job applications last month fell to 1.27 million, the lowest since March, after 10 straight months of increases, the closely held Chelmsford, Massachusetts-based company said today in a statement.

And this is news. Temporary holiday season would help those numbers not to mention that number of applications went down. This is about as ridiculous as the jobs report on Friday.

The latest thing I have read that blows that report out of the water. From David Rosenburg.

It’s remarkable nobody talks about this. The big surprise in the payroll data was the service sector component; it rose 58k. But we know from the ADP report that service sector employment fell 81k, which was fractionally worse than the 79k decline in October. Such a discrepancy has occurred less than 3% of the time in the past, and each time, the following month after the big gap, there was a convergence ... with headline nonfarm payrolls swinging 100k lower on average, which would imply a 111k decline when December’s figure comes out.

Also take note that the +58k print in the service sector payroll was completely at odds with the 41.6 reading in the ISM non-manufacturing employment index in November — a figure that in the past was consistent with a -192k tally in service sector payrolls and never before aligned with a positive number. Go back to the 2001 recession, and the worst ISM non-manufacturing jobs subindex was 43.9 (right after 9/11) and here we published a figure that was more than two points shy of that!

There was some good things in the report and the report may get better as we hire 1.5 million people for a few months for the 2010 census. We really need one person for every 300 people?

Finallt this is just incredible. From the Financial Times.

HSBC estimates that 85 per cent of UK loans made in the past five years are in breach of lending agreements. But banks are ignoring such problems. Instead they are rolling over loans as these near maturity, in the hope that capital values and loan-to-value (LTV) ratios will rise once again to refinanceable levels.

Analysts fear banks are storing up losses, particularly for lesser quality property. CB Richard Ellis, a consultancy, estimates that there are about £80bn ($132bn, €88bn) of poor quality property loans in the UK alone, or 27 per cent of all the British sector’s debt. More than £30bn worth are in breach of debt agreements or in default, according to De Montfort University – a tally that has doubled in just six months.

If you sit there and think about tose numbers, they should just blow your mind. 85% of UK loans made in the past five years are in breach of some sort of lending agreement? WOW