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riday brings us 1000000 worldwide cases, over 50000 deaths, start to the SBA loan program and unemployment for March.

Unemployment jumped to 4.4%, with U6 unemployment up to 8.7% and Nonfarm payrolls down -700000. All of these numbers were bigger than expected, with broad layoffs in all industries and sectors.

Global stock markets are relatively calm compared to other Friday’s during this crises. In Asia, Japan and South Korea finished almost neutral, while China was slightly down, -0.5%.

Europe started in the red over 1%, but as trading has continued at this time 8 30AM ET, they have recovered some of their losses. British FTSE is down 0.5%, French CAC down 0.2%, while the German DAX has turned positive +0.4%.

The US futures have followed the global markets, going down around 1% in the early hours of the morning and regaining some of these losses after European trading started. At this time they are down around 0.5%, after being positive for a couple of minutes around 8AM.

The coronavirus outbreak is still spreading and the US is contributing the most to the new case count. Yesterday it had almost 30000 new cases, up 10% from the day before. The President invoked the Defense Production Act to press more companies, especially 3M to ramp up production of necessary materials since the stock piles are running out. If the numbers continue to grow at this rate, we could see ventilator shortages and escalation of the emergency. Hopefully this will not happen.

Economic data from Europe this morning was very week, with PMI’s from Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the EU all missed expectations, down in the low 30’s and high 20’s. This signal significant economic decline.

In the USA, the Small Business Administration will start the loan programs to help the economy.

After the unemployment numbers hit there was the same reaction to the jobless claims numbers yesterday and last week. A spike of 1% in the next 3 minutes. I will not go into the logic of this, since there is absolutely no logic but that is what is happening.