Good morning. U.S stock prices ended yesterday pretty much flat to Wednesday with the Dow off 12 points to 17,900, the S&P 500 down 2 to 2,071 and the Nasdaq closing at 4,769, 5 points lower. I’d normally say “chatter” but it was a little scary intraday when the Dow was down 100 points! Then ECB President Draghi came out after its Governing Council met reiterating that the ECB will indeed implement a QE. This is nothing new and as Mr. Draghi stated the “package hasn’t been designed yet; no decision on implementation taken yet…composition of package may be influenced by incoming data.” But the market is taking it that something indeed is coming and are playing their cards accordingly.

Let’s just move onto this morning for the BIG report of the month came out and that is the Labor Department’s Employment Situation Report for November. And it was a blockbuster! U.S. employers added the largest number of workers in nearly 3 years in November and, importantly, wages increased. Nonfarm payroll surged by 321,000 last month the most since January 2012 and way above economists’ expectations. The unemployment rate held steady at 5.8% which is a 6 year low. Additional good news came with the Department revising their September and October employment figures higher by 44,000. November marks the 10th straight month job growth has exceeded 200,000. This is the longest streak since 1994. One of the subcategories the Fed has been closely watching is wage growth for although employment has increased this year, wages have not and the November report was positive showing average hourly earnings increased by 9¢, the largest increase since June of last year. That’s left earnings up 2.1% for the year which is still well below the increase of 3% or more the Fed would be comfortable with and give them fuel to raise interest rates, which has been near zero since way back in December 2008.

Although the jobs data was really good investors are playing it cautiously this morning with Dow futures up only 23 points. But up is up and a lot better than down!

Crude remained under pressure yesterday with WTI closing 57¢ lower at $66.81 and Brent down 28¢ at $69.64. After the close the Saudi’s came out and stated they were lowering the price for crude for Asian and U.S. markets. The (price) war is on, amigos! I’ve been following Saudi Arabia’s actions for a long, long time and I’ve never seen them lower prices for the purpose of maintaining market share, which is their motivation now (Now I’m assuming they’re not doing this as a result of a secret agreement with the West to push oil prices down to punish Putin in exchange for the West to continues its attacks on ISIL.) The discounts the Saudis are giving for January for its Asian customers were the biggest since at least 2002 while prices for the U.S. were cut for the 5th month in a row. The Saudi’s rationale for not cutting production is that U.S. shale producers will simply take thee market share.

Oil prices have fallen 40% since June and are down again this morning on the news of the Saudi discounts with WTI off $1.24 this morning. As I said before, this QE the average global citizen will benefit from, at least those that live in a country that is a net consumer.

The EIA released its weekly natural gas storage report and it was not kind to the bulls showing 22 Bcf was withdrawn from storage last week. This is below last year’s huge withdrawal for the same week of 141 Bcf, the 5 year average of 50 Bcf and most importantly, less than the market’s expectation of 28 Bcf. The consequence of the report was natty got obliterated closing down 15.6¢ at $3.649. After a couple of very, very cold weeks in November Mother Nature has turned her other cheek and is bringing some very, very warm weather to North America for December. Aslan has defeated the White Witch!

Courtesy of MDA Information Systems LLC

Red and orange continues to dominate the entire North American continent for the next 2 weeks. On December 14th Cincinnati is forecasted to be 10 degrees above normal and Chicago 16! Downright balmy! All that being said, the shorts are booking some profits ahead of the weekend with natty being up 5.6¢ this morning. Not much considering the bludgeoning natty has taken this week. Have a nice weekend.