S&P 500 -0.66% This Morning

The market is sliding lower again today, continuing its trend from late yesterday.

There was some good economic news today. The number of first-time jobless claims for unemployment benefits dropped by 24,000 to 435,000. That’s the lowest level since mid-July. Economists were expecting a drop of 9,000.

The number of people filing unemployment claims for a second week or more fell to 4,301,000. That’s down 86,000 from last week’s revised average of 4,387,000.

If Congress doesn’t make any changes by the end of this month, two million people will run out of unemployment benefits next month.

General Motors just reported a profit of $2.16 billion. The company is due to IPO next week. Well, I guess technically we don’t need an I in their IPO since the company has been traded for many decades. GM is 61% owned by Uncle Sam.

The plan is for GM to sell 365 million shares somewhere between $26 and $29 per share. That works out to somewhere between $9.5 billion and $10.5 billion. GM will also offer about $3 billion in preferred stock that will become common stock. I wouldn’t go anywhere near this offering.

The government also said that our massive trade deficit narrowed just a tad in September. The trade gap closed by 5.3% to $44 billion in September. Still, the trade gap for the year is 40% higher than last year’s. Exports rose by 0.3% to 154.1 billion. That’s the highest level in two years. Imports dropped by 1% to $198.1 billion.

Posted by on November 10th, 2010 at 10:23 am


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