A pretty good week, overall.  Perhaps my recent persimism has been unfounded.  It will take a few more weeks like this to change my overall,  but it's a decent start.

Factory Orders went into negative territory,  but like Durable Goods, have been very sporadic of late.

Overall, Mfg and Services remain in bullish territory,  ISM is well off the +60 range we saw for much of last year, but as I've said, anything above 55 is a very strong reading.

Job Openings remain in what were record territory until recently. We dropped back 100k to 10.8 Million.  NO where near the ominous reading we had last month where we lost over a half million openings while adding less than 200k jobs. Quits ticked up to 4.5 million over last months 4.3. Workers are VERY confident as these are previously unseen numbers.   6+ months ago, 2-3 million was very rare.

Jobless Claims came back to a level that IMO, is more in line with the current market. In a labor market like this, layoffs will be limited to absolute necessity. Sub par workers are safe.

The obvious headline this week is the Employment Situation. the most bullish since at least October 21 and probably going back to July of last year when the economy was busy reopening.  467K jobs vs 199k last month and a forecast of 150k.  Labor Participation rate jumped up .3 to 62.2, our highest post pandemic reading.Hourly earnings  gapped up .7,  but with current inflation and a tight market, that may be low.   There is nothing in this report to cause concern. Quite the contrary.  (Side note*. Highest Labor Participation rate, in 2000, was above 67. Pre-pandemic was about 63.5)

Equities had an immediate negative reaction to this report. I'm assuming it lead to fears of a more hawkish fed. AT last check, that fear apears to have been overridden by this report.  Earnings reports, overall, have been good to great. Facebook took a major hit which helped fuel yesterday's selloff,  but for the most part, very positive. Anyway,  not enough interest in equities here for me to drone on :-)

I'll give the week a solid C+, largely influenced by Employment,  but there is nothing to justify anything lower  There aren't much in the way of reports next week,  but let's hope the good news continues.  I'll be watching to see how Atl Fed adjusts their Q1:22 GDP forecast based on this.  Currently remains at a paltry 1/10th of 1 percent.