At 1.186 million, initial claims came in well below estimates of 1.46 million. Futures rallied on the news, but are still slightly in the red after breaking below trend overnight.All eyes are on tomorrow’s nonfarm payroll data which Trump has already characterized as “big jobs numbers.”  Will it be enough? At what point will the market run out of patience with Congress?

continued for members…Unless ES is meant to surge to new all-time highs without a vaccine, we are likely at the end of the rally.

The SPX version, showing the falling white channel which would theoretically come into play. At this point, SPX could fall to the bottom of its rising white channel without breaking below the 2.618 and SMA200 at 3047 and 3053 respectively. It will be very easy to see any downturn get started.VIX was hanging near its recent lows until just after 9am, when it plunged almost to its .886 in a 5-second shot across the bow.

After a sharp reversal yesterday, oil and gas are again bouncing. Gold continues climbing toward its next Fib target… …while SI has popped through overhead resistance.USDJPY and EURUSD have crawled into a hole, going essentially nowhere since yesterday.

This leaves DXY unchanged.The 10Y continues to inch higher as yields continue to inch lower. The 2s10s is still slipping even as the 2Y tagged 10 bps, a new low. A couple of other touchstones to keep an eye on:  AAPL is going sideways after an attempted breakout… …while AMZN is still making lower highs.As to Congress, perhaps they need to see a sharp selloff in order to take action. We’ve seen it happen many times before.

A WSJ article cites a study which details the impact of a lack of action: “Mr. Ganong and his co-authors estimate that letting the funds utterly lapse would trigger mixture spending to fall 4.3% in a single month—better than the decline seen throughout the 2007-09 recession. Shrinking the weekly profit to $200 would end in a 2.3% spending drop, and setting it at $400 would result in a 1.4% decline, they estimated.estimates that a one month absence of the $600 unemployment payments would reduce national consumption by 4%, the largest decline since the GFC.”

more later…