The Labor Department reports new claims for unemployment benefits rose by 10,000 to 244,000 last week. It has been below 300,000 for 111 straight weeks. Continuing claims fell by 49,000 to 1.98 million. That’s the for the second month in a row they’ve been below 2 million during the current eight-year economic expansion.
Big fund managers are dropping their opposition to including domestic Chinese stocks in global indexes. BlackRock the world’s largest asset manager, said it supports including mainland shares in MSCI benchmarks which are used by global money managers to guide trillions of dollars in investments. Deutsche Asset Management, one of the world’s biggest managers of exchange-traded funds, also said that from the ETF perspective there are no more technical problems with including China’s domestic equities, known as A-shares, in MSCI indexes.
Freddie Mac reports mortgage rates are down. The 30-year fixed averaged 3.97% this week down from last week’s 4.08%. A year ago it was 3.59%. The 15-year fixed averaged 3.23% down from 3.34%. A year ago it was 2.85%.
Serving the West Side first, I am Bill Roller of BR Capital for 1360 KUIK.
