On Friday, the December unemployment numbers were released and the official stats showed us losing another 524,000 jobs with unemployment reaching 7.2%. The total losses make 2008 the worst year since 1945, when the US was coming out of WWII.

The "real" unemployment number, which includes the under-employed and those that have stopped looking for work, now stands at 13.2%. Remember, in the last 11 recessions, 76% of unemployment occured in the second half of the recession. I continue to forecast that the official unemployment figures will reach 12% before we have a turn in the economy.

Having shared all of this negative news, the stock market continues to hold its 50 day moving average, and as long as it can do that, the short term trend remains higher. In the gold market, the rebalancing that I wrote about last week is underway, with gold taking a small hit but nothing like what some of the analsyts had predicted. Yesterday, Merrill Lynch came out and said that their high net wo...