Quote Originally Posted by agamemnus View Post
silver is in a full-scale crash... I don't really know what triggered it exactly..
Not discounting what wiggin said, but there's also this:

SYDNEY (MarketWatch) — Analysts offered a wide variety of reasons for Thursday’s plunge in commodities, but some agreed the main force behind the drop might simply be a matter of stampeding speculators.

“It all began with silver, which started falling sharply late last week when CME Group increased margin requirements on trades,” said BMO Financial Group Chief Economist Sherry Cooper, in a note Thursday.

Indeed, the CME’s repeated hikes to the silver-margin requirements sent the metal, which as of April 29 had risen nearly 60% for the year, tumbling, with benchmark silver futures losing more than 25% since then.

But a variety of other news, including a Wall Street Journal report that billionaire financier George Soros was selling off his holdings, helped the losses snowball, and on Thursday, silver fell 8% on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, its largest one-day percentage drop since Dec. 1, 2008.

This touched off massive selling across the commodities complex.

Quote Originally Posted by wiggin View Post
Anyone see the employment numbers from the BLS today? Pretty encouraging, especially given the sorta 'off' data from earlier in the week. Another quarter million jobs (even discounting continued cuts in public sector jobs), making it the third month in a row with that scale of hiring, and decent growth in manufacturing and retail, two important bellwether sectors. I'm not too concerned with the unemployment numbers - first, it's less accurate data than payroll numbers, and second, it might indicate people re-entering the workforce, which is an undeniable win.

Some commodities seem to be creeping up again, unsurprisingly, but we'll have to see how the numbers look down the road.
That's glass half-full, rose colored optimism. Don't forget there's always another side to things.


One Million Apply for 62,000 Jobs…with McDonald’s
Friday, May 06, 2011

There has been so much talk in Washington and in the news about the national debt, terrorism, wars and healthcare that one might think these are the issues that most concern Americans in 2011. But opinion polls consistently show that none of these issues is as important to most Americans as the Big Issue: unemployment and the economy.

An unusually vivid example occurred on April 19, which McDonald’s declared National Hiring Day, encouraging people across the country to apply for a job.

The world’s biggest restaurant chain reported that it received one million applicants for open positions, which resulted in 62,000 people gaining employment. Another 900,000 plus were turned down.

A McDonald’s spokeswoman said the company had planned to hire only 50,000 new employees. But the intense demand prompted it to take on an additional 24% in staff.

Throughout the country, the dearth of job opportunities prompted huge numbers of people to ask Ronald McDonald for employment. In Florida, for example, 100,000 applications were submitted for about 4,300 positions. In Chicago, more than 75,000 job-seekers vied for 2,000 openings.