What Record Unemployment Means for Macy’s (M)
Feb 12th, 2009 | By Charles Delvalle | Category: Chart of the DayThis recession isn’t like anything we’ve seen previously. Even I’ve cut back on the egregious amount of fast food dining I do in the face of deflation.
And although you hear about layoffs, most people simply don’t understand the scope of these layoffs. That is until now…
This is a chart of Initial and Continued Employment Claims which I grabbed from www.calculatedriskblog.com.
As you can see, continued jobless claims have now eclipsed the peaks we saw during the mid-70’s and early-80’s recessions. Yet we are still expected to continue seeing heavy job losses throughout the remainder of the year.
There’s no way you can expect consumer spending (which makes up 70% of GDP) to rebound until jobs start being created again. That means high-end retailers like Macy’s (NYSE:M) which used to see a lot of sales from the middle-class over the past few years, should continue to see shares slide as the middle class tightens up and starts shopping at places like Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) instead.
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Charles Delvalle is a self-taught market-timing professional and value analyst who's followed and invested in the market for the past ten years. He uses a unique combination of technical and fundamental research to pinpoint rapid profit opportunities with stocks and options.
Charles is also a staunch contrarian and takes pride in finding undervalued sectors and discovering undervalued, cash-rich companies. He frequently mocks government stupidities and points out the "inaccuracies (or lies, take your pick) that government reporting frequently dispels as "truth".
