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Markets Brace for 'Fearsome Friday'

By Robert Stacy McCain on 9.4.09 @ 5:45AM

After four consecutive days of losses, Wall Street bounced up yesterday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average posting a 64-point gain. But today is, by all accounts, The Big Day of the week.

The Labor Department will issue its key jobs report -- August non-farm payroll numbers -- at 8:30 a.m. ET today, and market-watchers seem especially jittery. Yesterday saw a strong uptick in gold prices, a safety move in troubled times, and it was a precious-metals trader who dubbed today "Fearsome Friday."

Historically, September has been a bad month on Wall Street, and last fall, the Dow lost more than 3,000 points in eight weeks after Labor Day. Whether the market goes up or down on today's jobs report, the continued high rate of unemployment -- generally expected to be at reported at 9.5% by the Labor Department -- is undermining confidence about recovery prospects:

Even if the report were to show slowing job losses, it will not be enough to shake nagging doubts that a nascent U.S. economic recovery could fizzle, analysts said on Thursday.
"I'm not sure how much the data will tell us," said T.J. Marta, market strategist at Marta on the Markets in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. "We have a pretty big structural employment problem, and that's not going away."