This could get ugly. Another month, another 600k+ jobs expected to be lost. This would mark the 16th straight month of job losses, just one month short of the longest streak in history.

Gold rose in Europe on Friday, building on the previous session’s near 3 percent gains, as Wall Street’s slide to 12-year lows curbed appetite for equities and the dollar tumbled ahead of U.S. jobs data later this session.

Oil rose above $44 a barrel on Friday, after sinking 4 percent in the previous session, gaining support from a weaker dollar and a meeting of OPEC later this month.

U.S. jobs data likely to reinforce economic gloom… Saudi Arabia to deepen output cuts in February

The economic calendar wastes no time getting off to a busy start in the first full week of 2009.  The Construction Spending report for November this morning leads off the week, and carrying over from last year, it should show a continued slowdown. Until the housing market stabilizes, and the credit markets unfreeze, money simply won’t be spent on new construction. Since neither of those options looks likely to occur anytime soon, 2009 could be another long year for the construction industry.

U.S. non-farm payrolls fall 533,000 in November… Oil slips more than 2 percent

Now that the turkey-induced coma has worn off, it’s time for the market to get back to work. Heading into the final month of the year, we could hope for an early Christmas present and a strong rally, but that will be a tall order.

Both the ISM Index and ISM Services reports come out this week, and it looks like the slide continues. The Index report coming out this morning is likely to show a drop to 42.0 from last month’s 43.5 reading.

US employers slashed 80,000 jobs in March — the biggest monthly job decline in five years.

From Reuters:

The Labor Department revised the first two months of the year’s job losses to a total of 152,000 from a previous estimate of 85,000. The March unemployment rate jumped to 5.1 percent from 4.8 percent, the highest since a matching rate in September 2005.

The March job report was bleaker than expected. Economists polled ahead of the report forecast a decline of 60,000 in non-farm payrolls and a rise in the unemployment rate to 5 percent.