The futures were up slightly last night. This morning, Microsoft decided to announce before the opening bell instead of after the closing bell. They disappointed. 5,000 job cuts, no more guidance, and 47 vs expectations of 49 cents per share. This after Apple and IBM beat expectations. The stock responded by taking an immediate 8% hit (and then recovered a tiny amount before opening). The European exchanges moved negative after the announcement. The futures took a dive. Microsoft is one of those companies that gets treated as an economic indicator.

Speaking of economic indicators, we had a couple of those today as well. Housing Starts, Permits in U.S. Slump to Record Low. A 16% decline in housing starts was worse than expected. Jobless data came out. Also from that article:

Another government report showed the number of Americans filing first-time claims for unemployment benefits rose last week, matching a 26-year high. Initial jobless claims increased by 62,000 to 589,000, more than forecast, in the week ended Jan. 17, according to a Labor Department report today in Washington.

As usual, I urge anyone thinking of people over trends to look at the unadjusted numbers (raw data) in the actual DOL report:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 768,858 in the week ending Jan. 17, a decrease of 187,905 from the previous week. There were 415,149 initial claims in the comparable week in 2008.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 4.2 percent during the week ending Jan. 10, a decrease of 0.2 percentage point from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 5,638,630, a decrease of 211,240 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 2.5 percent and the volume was 3,272,000.

768,858 people lost their jobs in a week. State unemployment offices are being strained. For the actual unemployed and the unemployment insurance funds, the raw numbers matter a lot more than the seasonally adjusted numbers (although, hopefully their budgeting and staffing accounts for the seasonal adjustment). It’s good to see the raw numbers coming down, even if on a seasonally adjusted basis they are still rising. That said, it’s bad to see the seasonally adjusted numbers rising.

Incidentally, today I will disagree with headlines blaming these economic indicators for the market dip. This morning was all about Microsoft.