In this morning's Breakfast With Dave newsletter, Rosie discusses offers his doubts on the "recovery" in light of blatantly weak data.

Breakfast With Dave: The economy continues to pull a rabbit out of the hat and expand even with contracting employment and bank credit. As we stated above with respect to Wal-Mart’s weak sales data, how did Mr. Market manage to ignore the labour market news yesterday. All we hear from bullish strategists is that jobless claims are the key, and while they have been improving in recent months, yesterday’s data was disappointing in that claims rose 31,000 in the February 13 week, to 473,000. Unfortunately, that was the nonfarm payroll survey week.



While the number of continuing claims was unchanged at 4.56 million that understates the situation because when all the emergency benefit programs are included, the backlog of total unemployment claimants jumped 280k in the January 30 week to a whopping 11.7 million.