Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Eln. I'm joined by Motley Fool's Senior Analyst

James Early, Shannon Zimmerman, and Tim Hansen. Guys, happy Friday. Happy Friday to you, Chris.

Seth Jason is out this week because he decided that being there for the birth of his first

child was somehow more important than being here for this podcast. I mean, can you believe

it? What's with the priorities on this guy? Anyway, we got a lot to get to this week,

including things heating up between Google and Apple. AIG reports a quarterly profit. Yes,

AIG. China does something that makes Bernie made off really, really glad he lives in America.

And as always, we'll share three stock ideas. But we begin with Fridays better than expected

jobs numbers. The unemployment rate for July fell to 9.4 percent down from June's 9.5 percent.

The market's opened up sharply on the news with the S&P hitting a 10-month-high Shannon.

We've got to talk that the recession is easy. We've even got some talk out there that

the recession may already be over. What's the takeaway for investors? Certainly, neither of

those. Should I give you any more options? Well, I'm going to make up my own option, actually.

So it is good news. There's just no getting around that. That's wonderful. Fewer people

are out of work. And that in itself is terrific news. And it's especially good news when

you connect that dot to the fact that our economy is powered largely by consumer spending.

We're still within spending the sense of 10 percent. Most economists seem to think that

that's the figure that we're going to arrive at by the end of the year. And when consumers

are not spending and they're saving more, that's ultimately a good thing for the long haul.

But when the economy needs stimulating, that's not helping much of anything. And so from

the investing perspective, people need to take a look at economic and fundamental corporate

fundamental reality and compare that to a market that's risen by 40 percent since the

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