Stocks Inexplicably Close Red After Economy Loses Millions More Jobs

The headline banner may be a little misleading:

The Good – Stocks are up (all it took was a few trillion dollars)? Oil is up (all it took was threats of war)?
The Bad – COVID cases are up, COVID deaths are up (and Gilead’s drug is a dud)…
The Ugly – Over 26 million Americans have now filed for unemployment benefits in the last 5 weeks, PMI…

A three-way-standoff between ugly real economic data, ongoing global lockdowns, and The Fed’s “whatever it takes” asset liftathon…

For the fifth week in a row, The Dow managed gains on the back of simply unprecedented surge in joblessness BUT the S&P 500 and Nasdaq DID NOT!!…

3/26 – 3.31mm jobless, S&P +6.24%, Dow +6.38%
4/02 – 6.87mm jobless, S&P +2.28%, Dow +2.24%
4/09 – 6.62mm jobless, S&P +1.45%, Dow +1.21%
4/16 – 5.24mm jobless, S&P +0.58%, Dow +0.12%
4/23 – 4.43mm jobless, S&P -0.04%, Dow +0.18%

As LPL’s Ryan Detrick noted “So stocks have never dropped when more than 3 million people apply for unemployment. That is crazy.”

Nasdaq and the S&P were unable to hold the early gains that were lost after the Gilead headlines.

Crazy indeed Ryan and the US’ COVID cases and deaths continues to rise – so ignore that too…

oh and Gilead’s stock price has erased all of its gains from last week as its Remdesivir drug proved to be a dud… but stocks are hopeful…

So, in its worst precedent yet, bad news – the absolute worst – is good news? Because it means fiscal and monetary idiocy will go all the way to ’11’ – even if it’s not already there.

But safe-havens were bid with bonds (price) rising…