America’s workers are shaking off the effects of the Great Recession and beginning to swagger again. While the official unemployment rate remains high, Americans are feeling better about job prospects as the housing recovery, booming car sales and record exports build economic confidence. Here’s why:

1. Layoffs are dwindling and jobs are becoming easier to find. The number of people filing for unemployment benefits last week fell to the second-lowest level since 2008. The Labor Department reports that 14 Americans voluntarily left a job for another opportunity for every 10 who were laid off or fired – a level of labor-market strength that has returned to 2007 levels. The volume of advertised job openings is up 80% since the depths of the recession in 2009. As a result of this improved demand for workers, more than half of those answering a long-running survey said they believe it would be somewhat or very easy for them to find a new job if necessary.

2. In 2013, American workers will

This has been another week in which the market machines have displeased their human masters - or should that be human slaves?

From the "Twitter flash crash" to a forced shutdown of Charles Schwab Corp's (SCHW) brokerage network to a nearly day-long system outage at the CBOE Holdings Inc.'s (CBOE) Chicago Board Options Exchange, the past few days have served as an uneasy reminder that U.S. markets are a twitchy assemblage of computer networks arranged for maximum speed and eye-blink competition for order flow. This includes little human mediation from manned trading desks or central exchange floors.

First was Tuesday's momentary "#HashCrash," when headline-scanning trading computers helped drop stock indexes more than 1% after a bogus Tweet from the hacked Twitter account of the Associated Press "reported" that a White House explosion had injured President Obama. Stocks fleetingly lost and recovered hundreds of billions of market value before most investors had even ingested the fake

Success, they say, has many fathers, while failure is an orphan. And so Apple Inc. (AAPL) has gone from being every investor’s favorite child to the stray that few are eager to claim.

A year ago, Apple stock was around $600, up 90% over the prior ten months and headed for an eventual peak above $700, swelling its parent-owners with pride. The indulgent sort known as growth-stock investors gushed, “Look at how it thrives, inventing such marvels that no one ever before conceived, earning beyond our dreams, and with half a world yet to conquer.”

The self-professed stricter sort of parents calling themselves value investors asked, “When has the biggest, most profitable and most popular company also been valued so moderately - no more expensive than the average stock, and so prudent with a buck that cash absolutely piles at its feet?”

An unwelcome stock

Today Apple has proven a loser for anyone who’s bought it since Christmas 2011, having collapsed to just above $400. The stock actually

Listen to the stock market the past couple of weeks and you’ll hear the hiss of deflation, of air leaking out of the 2013 rally as concerns build about downward pressure on economic growth, prices and corporate profit potential.

While the Standard & Poor’s 500 index ebbed 3.5% from its recent all-time high to Thursday’s close, this represents a sub-surface correction among stocks exposed to global economic momentum finally roiling the market’s surface. The index’s energy and basic-materials sectors are each down more than 5% in the past week.

Gold, suffering from dimming concern about systemic financial risk as well as cooling inflation worry, is down more than 20% from its all-time high and down 10% since April 11. Crude oil is off 15% since February and lumber futures are lower by 10% in a month.

The 10-year Treasury yield is near 1.70%, down steeply from 2.05% five weeks ago. An auction Thursday of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS, which compensate investors for

It’s no surprise that Twitter – the ingenious and versatile social platform – has been called the “new ticker tape” and is hailed as a valuable tool for gaining an edge in the markets.

After all, dating to the advent of carrier pigeons, every technology breakthrough finds financiers and speculators among the earliest adopters.

The first ticker-tape machines were installed in only a handful of New York banks. Big investment firms were among the first to buy access to undersea telegraph cables. Cheap fiber networks spurred the creation of high-frequency trading bots and $8 online stock trades.

As for Twitter, as far back as October 2010, an academic paper asserted that its "mood predicts the stock market.” New research from the MIT media lab finds that “social traders” – those who monitor peers’ ideas and investment activity – seem to have better trading results than others.

A firm called DCM Dealer captured some buzz early this year by offering a Twitter-based trading platform utilizing

The plausible and promised merger rush hasn’t yet begun, despite calm markets, cheap debt and cash-flush companies. But Wall Street’s new-stock assembly line is running again at moderate speed this year. Initial offerings in the first-quarter raised 37% more than the depressed IPO proceeds of a year earlier, according to Bloomberg.

So far, the equity-offering apparatus is mostly turning out low-tech, easy-to-understand consumer plays – often companies owned by a larger parent or buyout investors – in tune with current investor appetites for the steady and familiar.

An initial offering for Fairway Group Holdings Inc. (FWM) – a beloved low-frills New York City grocer featuring high-quality produce and prepared foods – was priced late Tuesday at $13 per share, above the anticipated range of $10 to $12. The stock immediately popped 30% higher as it began trading Wednesday morning. The deal raised $179 million, split between the chain of a dozen bustling, over-stuffed stores, and its

Dish Network Corp.’s (DISH) dramatic $25 billion bid for Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) is a loud noise made when the unlimited bumps against the finite.

Growth in data transmission is unending, but the wireless spectrum available to handle it is constrained. Demand for an expanding variety of media content is boundless, yet any one company’s ability to deliver it is hindered by regulatory impediments and competitive habits.

Founder and CEO Charlie Ergen built Dish from nothing in 1980 to the third-biggest pay-television operator, with 14 million subscribers to its satellite-based broadband network. Yet he has long been clear about his view that the basic pay-TV business is in the process of being upended by consumers’ increasing willingness to grab entertainment content online wherever they are, a la carte or free of charge, through powerful mobile devices. A cheaper all-in-one, go-anywhere media and communications solution has seemed, to him, the best way both for his company to thrive and

It’s reassuring, in a way, that for all its fickle moods and unpredictable reactions, the stock market can always be counted on for one thing: confounding the expectations of the crowd.

For example, almost no one spent December hopscotching from conference room to TV studio predicting we were about to head back to 1980s Wall Street, with consumer and branded-goods stocks riding high, junk-bond issuance hitting records and corporate raiders flashing their swords. Yet that’s about what we’ve seen.

Even among those who correctly expected stocks to rise, the majority missed how and at what pace they've headed that way.

The standard Wall Street line coming into the year, delivered during the policy bar fight that spilled into the street after the election, went something like this: “Stocks should do better than bonds in 2013, with potential for the typical 10% annual gain that professional market handicappers cluster around. But the first half will be weaker and more volatile than the