Happy New Year! What a year it's been, too. We added 2.7M jobs this year and that's good because we also added 2.7M people to our population so, essentially, we didn't lose any ground. As more and more people left the labor force (retired, discouraged) however, official unemployment fell from 7% to 5.8%.
We still have 2M less people working than we did in 2007 – despite adding about 20M people (now 320M). I guess it's progress if one in 10 people are able to find a job, right?
Of course, none of that stuff matters as long as the rich get richer and boy did they – with the Forbes 400 adding $98Bn to their pile of cash in 2014. Now $98Bn is a lot of money for just 400 people to spend – so some of that trickles down to us poor folks who have humble financial newsletters or make expensive cars or pilot private jets – you know, regular Joes in the top 10% – it's been a very good year for us.
It's been a very good year for the markets with the NASDAQ leading us with a 14.4% gain on the year followed by the S&P 500 at 12.4%, Dow 8.5%, NYSE 5.2% and Russell 2000 4.25%. More impressive than the S&P's 12.4% gain was the fact that we went the ENTIRE YEAR without having more than 3 consecutive down days. That has NEVER happened before, NEVER. We can thank the World's Central Banksters for that these markets are now so manipulated, they can't go down anymore.
We're heading into the holiday weekend "Cashy and Cautious," a stance we have maintained since Thanksgiving as we hit our goals for the year early and we didn't want to risk losses which, as it turned our, was a very smart move as the market plunged 10% in November. Now we've recovered all of that loss and more but it was A LOT less stressful to watch it happen from the sidelines than to ride it out with the rest of you.