Well, on Friday we got the non-farm payroll report.

And of course, this jobs report is the most important jobs report ever because it was

going to determine whether or not the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates at its

September meeting.

And of course, I don't think the Fed was going to raise interest rates in September,

regardless of what this jobs number was.

It's just that so many people were convinced that it was going to happen just because several

Fed officials said it was possible.

Well, a lot of things are possible, but it doesn't make them probable.

And neither is a rate hike for no other reason.

Other than we have an election coming up in November and they don't want to take a chance

of a repeat of what happened after the last rate hike in December, given how weak the

market was in January, the last thing the Federal Reserve wants to do is hand that present

to Donald Trump.

So I think all this speculation about a September rate hike was a bunch of noise.

I mean, I think it makes more sense to believe in a December rate hike, although I still

think that that rate hike is also very improbable, just a little bit more believable than that

the Fed was going to pull the trigger before the election, because after the election, it

really doesn't matter because there's four years until another presidential election.

But before I get to the jobs number that came out on Friday, I want to talk about some

of the numbers that came out on Thursday, because we've got some very, very big numbers,

all them bad.

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