By Michael Strain

In diagnosing the state of our union, President Obama correctly observed that “our economy is adding jobs -- but too many people still can’t find full-time employment.” But the president’s call to increase the federal minimum wage by over 24 percent will make it harder for firms to hire workers because it will make workers more expensive. The minimum wage should not be increased, especially given the dismal state of the labor market.

The past several months have seen much attention paid to our fiscal imbalance. This attention is appropriate — our debt and structural deficit are important problems that require difficult solutions. But even informed citizens would think that the deficit is the biggest problem facing the United States today. It isn’t. We have a fiscal problem, but we have an immediate labor market crisis.

Unemployment Is Still High

The headline unemployment rate has dropped from its high of around ten percent to its current value of 7.9 percent. This

By Stephen W. Cox, CMT

Traders who relish risk are liable to find plenty of it that now that shares of credit card companies, which have racked up enviable gains over the past year, are now losing upside momentum on the charts and I conclude that a correction is imminent.

But risk in this case is the fact that shares are consolidating near uptrend highs and so sales are strictly aggressive.

The weekly chart of MasterCard (MA) shares makes the point of waning upside momentum explicit, that is, the six chart bars at the top of the uptrend. Their horizontal march across the chart betrays uptrend exhaustion. I call this phenomenon a “drifting top.” It’s notable that the bar of three weeks ago, the trend high, reached up just above $535.00 before losing more than half of that week’s gain, an instance of what some traders call a “rejection of the high” of last week in this case. And in case shares of MasterCard should break down on the weekly chart then shares will be targeting $485.00, an