The worst job market in a generation is getting worse.  The unemployment rate in June rose to 9.5% - the highest since the early 80s.  All told, almost 15 million Americans are out of work.

So what's a new grad or a displaced worker to do?  Create your own job.  That’s the advice of serial entrepreneur Jeff Hoffman.  “Now that there aren't jobs - high unemployment and it's just not as safe to be in big corporate America - it's a perfect time to be more innovative, more creative and plot out your own future.”

He should know.  Hoffman was a founding employee of priceline.com before moving to Enable Holdings, the parent company of auction house uBid.com and retailer RedTag.com.

His tips for those looking to be their own boss:

• Don't put your dreams on hold. “Wherever there’s chaos or crisis, there's opportunity.”

• Be a problem solver.  “When there are problems there are more solutions needed”

Stocks are falling today after employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, higher than the 363,000 expected by economists. Unemployment rose to 9.5%, a bit below forecasts but still the highest level since Ronald Reagan’s first term in office.

According to the government, 14.7 million Americans were unemployed in June; add in “discouraged workers” who’ve fallen out of the official survey and the figure rises to 19.6 million, according to T.J. Marta, chief strategist at MartaontheMarkets.com. What really troubles Marta is the rising number of unemployed who have little or no hope of finding a job. “Your ‘Wall Streeters’, your autos workers and your housing workers – those jobs are not coming back,” he says.

Click "more" to view the rest of the post and embed the video.» More

From The Business Insider, July 2, 2009:

The rate of crash for real-estate prices nationwide has finally begun to moderate.  Specifically, it dropped from -19% a year in March to -18% a year in April.

No, that's not much to celebrate.  But it's a step in the right direction.

Of course, as your ever-optimistic neighborhood realtor will tell you, real-estate is a local business: Each market is different.

What does that mean? 

Well, in this case, it means that some markets are falling slowly, and other markets are falling like rocks. 

It also means that some markets are falling more slowly than they used to be (a good sign) and some are still accelerating into the depths (bad).*  The rate of collapse in some of the hardest-hit markets, in fact, is beginning to improve.  In more sheltered markets like New York, meanwhile, the decline is accelerating.

How's your market doing?  Here's a run-through of the trends in the 20 cities in the Case-Shiller index, ordered by current peak-to-trough collapse.

Click here to see how individual states are faring.

*Your realtor's implication here--that YOUR market is about to start SOARING--is almost certainly a hallucination.  What is remarkable about this real-estate crash is how synchronized it is: almost every market in the country rolled over at almost the same time. But if you're lucky enough to live in Denver, Dallas, or Charlotte, the collapse is indeed much less severe than it is in, say, Phoenix and Las Vegas.  But then you didn't have the bubble boom, either.

From The Business Insider, July 2, 2009:

Update: The market is tanking. Dow futures are off over 100. In addition to the top-line numbers, the internals are horrible. The work week is now down to 33 hours, the shortest its ever been since the data's been collected.

Original post: Analysts were looking for about 350,000 job losses, so this is definitely a miss.

On CNBC they're now talking about the "two-month" average, to justify how things are still improving.

Unemployment for June has hit 9.5%, compares to 9.4% last month. That subtle gain is the "good news" in the report.

Here's the release from the BLS:...

Click "more" to view the full post.

More coverage from The Business Insider:

• The Manhattan real estate crashes
• Real estate crash: How's your city doing

It’s been more than a year since Bear Stearns imploded.  At the time, many Wall Street insiders thought that WAS the crisis.  Obviously, they were wrong.  So, what caused the crisis and what’s changed as a result?  That’s the basis of this segment with author and former investment banker, William Cohan.

Cohan argues the global financial system was brought to its knees by the people at the top.  The ‘House of Cards’ author says, “the decisions made by the executives at Bear Stearns over a long period of time” resulted in the firm’s collapse.  The same holds true for Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the other financial firms that have either folded or needed government assistance to survive.

Cohan points out Wall street firms took great risk they would never advise their own clients to take.  Cohan’s book illustrates that point in great detail. And, just how fragile confidence and trust can be on Wall Street. In the days before its demise, Bear Stearns was borrowing $75 billion a day in the ‘repo’ market in order to fund its operations.  In return for that cash, Bear would use their assets and securities – largely, exotic mortgage-backed securities - as collateral.  Bear’s fate was sealed when their lenders lost confidence in the value of that collateral.  Within days the jig was up and the 5th-largest securities firm was forced to sell to JPMorgan Chase for $10 a share, a mere fraction of what it as worth just a few months before.

While that kind of risk and leverage may have faded for now, Cohan is confident this won’t be the last crisis on Wall Street.  “There’s not a whole lot of financial innovation going on right now... but I’m sure the seeds of the next great financial innovation are being sown already...and that means we’re well on our way to inflating the next bubble.”

Click "more" to embed the video.

Despite a lousy finish, the Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 15% in the second quarter, its best quarter in a decade. For sure, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s now famous 'green shoots' phrase helped fuel that rally. But "the economy is about to take back seat to corporate earnings and guidance," according to Dan Greenhaus, analyst with Miller Tabak’s Strategy Group. "You can only rally so much on 'less bad'."

While the economy may be getting less bad it’s time for corporate America to put up or shut up. "Some portion of the rally was based, not just on economic stabilization, but the idea growth will follow," Greenhaus says. "If you don’t get that second half of the story it’s going to be very hard to continue to rally equity prices."

Even if earnings and guidance do surprise investors, Greenhaus believes the days of 3% growth are gone; “that’s a fairly ambitious goal going forward,” he says, predicting..."

Click "more" to view the rest of the post and embed the video.

From The Business Insider, July 1, 2009:

Six months into the Obama presidency and the New York Times is already running an autopsy analyzing how he could have been so wrong about the economy.

David Leonhardt's bottom line?  The administration was deluded by hope.

We doubt it.  We suspect Obama, Summers, Geithner & Co. just decided that they had to issue rose-colored projections about the unemployment rate and recovery or they would never have a hope in hell of ramming such huge spending increases through.  And if the forecasts proved optimistic?  Well, by then, maybe everyone would have forgotten.

They haven't.

At the time, we noted that Obama was taking a huge risk here: The collapse of the economy certainly wasn't his fault, and, no matter what, recovery was likely going to take years.  If nothing else, we thought, Obama should preserve his own credibility.

And now he has already blown it.

David Leonhardt: There are two possible explanations that the administration was so wrong. And sorting through them matters a great deal, because they point in opposite policy directions.

The first explanation is that the economy has deteriorated because the stimulus package failed. Some critics say that stimulus just doesn’t work, while others argue that this particular package was too small or too badly constructed to make a difference...

See also from The Business Insider:

• Obama's Economic Forecast Threatens To Destroy His Credibility
• Venture capitalists have their worst quarter since 1999 

Providing an update on the market keys discussed here on April 2, Roque gives his insight on these six bellwethers in the accompanying video:

• Copper and Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold: Roque is focused on commodities because of their sensitivity to economic activity and inflation; "if the market's going to have some leadership we believe it will come from that sector," he says. Roque prefers copper to oil because it's "not as emotional" and sentiment driven. After the big rally from the lows, copper is likely to move sideways at best and "needs to base if it's going to rally again," he says. The same is true of Freeport McMoRan and Roque recommends reducing positions for those long the mining giant.
• Mosaic and Monsanto: The ag stocks are the "weakest link" among Roque's bellwethers which, he notes, all bottomed before the S&P and have outperformed the index since the March lows. If Mosaic and Monsanto continue to deteriorate, "assume the others will weaken as well," which will have negative implications for the broader market, he says.
• Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley: Financials are still 13% of the S&P 500 and Goldman and Morgan are likely leaders if Wall Street is going to return to "some semblance of its former glory," Roque says. Goldman, in particularly, is the bellwether of the bellwethers, the technician says, suggesting Goldman at $150 is the market's "Maginot line"; which side of $150 Goldman is on will signal the S&P 500's general strength or weakness.

As detailed here, Roque says the market deserves the "benefit of the doubt" but he sees limited upside for the foreseeable future...

Click "more" to view the rest of the post and embed the video.» More

From The Business Insider, June 30, 2009:

Every politician (except Michael Dukakis) has campaigned on some version of "no new taxes" and most ended up breaking that promise.

It's how we do things in America, and as voters we've come to accept how it works.  We're masochists. We like to be lied to.

Obama said he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone making under $250,000, a promise that's technically already been violated by new taxes on cigarettes and his pledge to sign cap & trade if it gets through The Senate. His aides would say those don't count.

But evens setting those aside, real tax hikes are almost certainly in the works, if only due to the massive amount of new spending (particularly on healthcare) this government has planned. The idea that it can all be financed on the (dwindling) $250k+ crowd is absurd.

Roger Altman of Evercore Partners and formerly of the Clinton administration writes today in the Wall Street Journal:

Only five months after Inauguration Day, the focus of Washington's economic and domestic policy is already shifting. This reflects the emergence of much larger budget deficits than anyone expected. Indeed, federal deficits may average a stunning $1 trillion annually over the next 10 years. This worsened outlook is stirring unease on Main Street and beginning to reorder priorities for President Barack Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership. By 2010, reducing the deficit will become their primary focus....

More coverage from The Business Insider: 

• Thank God cap and trade is a tax
• Obama vows to slam offshore tax loop shut

The stock market slumped midday Tuesday but the S&P 500 is still on track for its best second-quarter since 1998, up about 15%. The question, of course, is what the rest of the year looks like.

John Roque, managing director of WJB Capital Group, says the "market gets the benefit of the doubt" due to the following factors:

• NYSE cumulative breadth has outperformed the S&P year-to-date
• More NYSE stocks are making new highs vs. making new lows.

But Roque sees limited upside from here due to the lack of overall volume and relative few stocks making big bases on a long-term chart. One area where he does see this positive pattern developing is in healthcare, notably in names like...

Click "more" to view the rest of the post and embed the video.