Good morning, everybody. This is Martina’s Corner at Jores Capital on Monday, August 22, 2022. Welcome to our program. We are giving you a short summary on market news, politics, economics and other world news and market outlook every Monday and Thursday.
The US have practically reached full employment. Americans continue spending as employment is strong and inflation concerns have somewhat faded over the past days.
In the last quarter employment was rocking and rolling yet in the last 2 weeks of July the number of new jobs being posted was slowing down. On the other hand, employers, especially owners of smaller businesses find it hard to find workers. Why is this? The data we found shows that employers may not always be offering what employees are looking for. We find that after the pandemic, customers returned whereas workers did often not return to their old jobs. This is the case for various reasons: one is that the lockdowns have facilitated online jobs and with that the possibility for remote working. This has rendered it very difficult for certain industries to recover their workers after the pandemic. European airports find it still difficult to get labor as people found possibilities in other sectors where they do not have to do heavy work and late or early shifts. Another reason is that people may have seen their own economy damaged throughout the pandemic and had to move to areas with a lower cost of living.
Europe is already looking at their economies weakening, being on the brink of recession. On Tuesday the purchase manager’s index will be published and we expect it to confirm a weakening economy in the Euro zone and particularly in Germany, its leading economy. Reasons are mainly supply shortages, high commodity prices and high energy cost which make production expensive. As Germany is one of the World’s biggest export nations, high shipping cost is adding to this. To give you a number: cost of container shipping has multiplied by seven in the 2 years after the pandemic.
So, what’s happening in the markets at the moment: US indices are down. The S&P future lost 1% as of 4.05am Eastern time (10.05 CET). When we first looked at 2,39am Eastern, the DOW JONES future was at minus 140 points, now it is at minus 293 points which is minus 0,87%. The Nasdaq future trades at a minus of 1,25%. The German DAX is 1,57% down and the Spanish IBEX is 1,30% down, the LONDON FTSE also follows the downwards trend but less than the other indices. It’s 0,5% down at the moment.
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