Looking for good News, It may be hard to find right now

Jobs, jobs, jobs – that’s what investors have on their minds on Friday morning before stock market trading begins in North America.

In Canada, the news was upbeat: The economy added more jobs than expected in February for the second month in a row, with payrolls rising by 43,300 – many of them in loonie-scarred Ontario.

In the United States, where – let’s face it – the majority of eyeballs are focused right now, the news was far less sunny: Payrolls shrank by 63,000 in February, defying an expectation among economists for a slight bounce and confirming some of the worst suspicions about the declining health of the U.S. economy. The unemployment rate decline 4.8 per cent, but only because many job seekers had simply given up looking for work.

Just before the jobs data was released, U.S. index futures were pointing down. Futures for the Dow Jones industrial average fell 109 points, to 11,961. For the broader S&P 500, futures fell 9 points to 1299.

Overseas, major stock market indexes followed the big declines in North America on Thursday. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 and Germany’s DAX index each fell 0.9 per cent on Friday. In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 feel 3.3 per cent and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index fell 3.6 per cent.