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."
