In this video from Friday morning on CNBC, you can see Trish Regan and Jimmy Pethokoukis make the argument that “manufacturing jobs are dumb and the USA doesn’t need them.” At 3:24, you can see Pethokoukis say flat out “we don’t need assembly jobs.”

As the USA continues to enjoy “Depression Style” double-digit unemployment, you might wonder why people on the talking box are trying to tell us that we don’t need any more jobs. The answer is that they are shills for Corporate America which makes large profits in the “exporting jobs” trade.

You may also be wondering how Jimmy Pethokoukis still has a pundit job after writing one of the most idiotic columns in economic history: “Dude, Where’s My Recession?” on April 20, 2008. That’s right; Pethokoukis was mocking the bears on the eve of one of the worst economic collapses in history. The S&P 500 closed at 1388 that day, so if you followed this buffoon’s advice, you would still be deep underwater two years later.

What advice does “Jimmy P” have for us now? He wants unemployed factory workers to go to work writing iPhone apps for IDEO. I’m sure that IDEO is a fine company, but I wonder how many former factory workers they have on their staff?

According to Pethokoukis and Trish Regan, all of our problems would be solved if everybody “would just be smart”. But obviously not everybody is smart. What is the minimum IQ required to work at a company like IDEO? What kind of IQ do you need before embarking upon a career in software development? I don’t know, but I’m guessing >100, which means that half the population, 150 million people, are not qualified.

I’m sure that there are sirens going off at Political Correctness Police headquarters because I mentioned IQ. But guess what? You can try all you want to banish IQ, but it ain’t going away. You are born with an IQ, and it does not change. Deal with it!

The great thing about “dumb manufacturing jobs” is that the most complicated processes, such as building a transmission, can be broken down into steps that anybody can do. In an auto factory, you have very smart engineers working together with less-fortunate people. It’s a beautiful thing: no matter what your IQ is, you can find a niche on the staff.

Note to Detroit: You heard “Jimmy P”. What are you waiting for? Get off your lazy butts and start writing code, curing cancer, and sending a man to Mars! Anybody can do it!

It is appalling that people like Larry Kudlow, Trish Regan, and Jimmy Pethokoukis are so cavalier about jobs while the once great industrial city of Detroit is literally being sacked. Hopefully, one day they will be strung up as economic traitors to their country.

SPY, QQQQ, and IWM all printed bearish engulfing candles on their daily charts Thursday. And while its financial components kept the Dow from turning red, the XLF printed a gravestone doji on its chart.

All these bearish sticks don’t mean that you should plunge in short at the open. That would have been suicide on January 19th. Take a look at the January top on the QQQQ. The Q’s printed a bearish engulfing candle on January 15th, but then rallied to a new closing high the next Monday. On Tuesday, it rolled over. The moral of the story is that before the market takes a dive, it likes to do its fiendish best to squeeze out the shorts.

During Thursday’s trading, your hero (that would be me) posted one comment. But it was a doozy, right? At 12:35pm, I warned that the market might be ready to stall out. Look at the red arrow on this 5-minute SPX chart (click to enlarge):

How’s that for timing? Even better – the market was rising at that moment, and I was thinking that it would take a run at 1182, which is the third Fibonacci level in the TARP Box. I could have waited a few more minutes before posting, but I knew that my readers don’t get comments immediately, so I wanted to get it out there as soon as possible. Otherwise, the timing would have been even more awesome. And that’s just the kind-of guy I am; sacrificing my own glory for the sake of my readers.

It appears that Fitch’s downgrade of Portugal yesterday has caused the Germans to crack and abandon their hard-line toward Greece. Bloomberg story here. Futures have broken to a new high in the pre-market, so stocks seem to like this development. However, it is a loss of prestige for the euros since they have abandoned their stringent fiscal policies and gone hat-in-hand to the IMF. The FXE is gapping up this morning, but is still far below the gap-down that it made yesterday.

The SPX fell back below 1170 today, so maybe George’s call for a false breakout is coming true. And SPY finished the day with a bearish descending-triangle pattern on it’s 15-minute chart (click to enlarge):

While discussing Monday afternoon’s bear raid yesterday, I wrote:

“When I have seen this sort of thing in the past – when it looks like the gorilla got beat – he usually gets his way the next day.”

And even though the market broke to a new rally high, I think the gorilla got his banana, if not that big bunch that he was looking for. Take a look at this 1-minute chart of the NASDAQ-100 futures (NQ) (click to enlarge):

If you look at the volume during the raid (red box), you will see that it was very light. So, it probably didn’t take very much capital to knock the market down to 1946 (green line). The next morning (Tuesday), we got terrible housing news, and the NQ plunged down to 1941. I think the gorilla took that opportunity to cover up, probably with relief. Volume was heavier there, so he may have been able to exit his entire position with a decent profit.

After that, the market rallied the rest of the day with the shorts nowhere in sight. So, the moral of the story is that a light-volume market such as this can be slapped around by large players. But without a strong negative catalyst, it’s hard to keep the market down. The China trade war may prove to be a good catalyst for the bears, but we need to see the big guns fired. That would be something along the lines of the Treasury Department designating China as a “currency manipulator”, Congress passing a tariff bill, etc.