It has been a while since I made a post. I thought at the end of Janurary that the next down leg was starting, but no, the markets just kept going on up.  Greece has bought more time to try to get their expenditure under control, but it is almost impossible to put the “genie back into the bottle.”

Then early this month came the news that the US job market added 162,000 jobs for March.  This was the first increase in two years. But when the analysis is done we find that if you remove the tempory employment of the census workers and the other adjustments there was some 66,000 jobs lost. It is recognised that there has to be 100,000 jobs created each month just to keep up with the population increase, not counting the millions who have lost their jobs over the last two years.

Now to the FTSE, when I made my last comment it was just below 5200. Before Friday and the Goldman Sachs fraud announcement it was touching 5800. As the saying goes, there is never just one cockroach. Will this be the start of a correction?

There is an added factor which could play out to hurt the markets and that is the volcano spewing out ash in Iceland. This is causing major disruption to air travelers. There is hope that things will improve in a week or so, but don’t count on it.  I was listening to a radio program with a volcanologist speaking.  He was saying that the last time that volcano erupted it was 300 years ago, and it kept erupting for a year.  This caused a lowering of the temperature and crop failures.  It was one of the contributing factors to the French Revolution.  Just imagine what would be the consequences if air travel was disrupted for a year or more! So what with the banks in trouble again and nature throwing a fast ball it may put an end to the bulls party.