Jobs, Jobs, What Jobs?

Clearly, Canadian investors are in no mood for good news. Or, they simply just don’t care that Canada can churn out jobs when the U.S. is cutting them.

The S&P/TSX composite index dipped 130 points at the start of trading on Friday morning, down 1 per cent o 13,230, after Statistic Canada said the Canadian economy pumped out 43,000 jobs in February. Once again, banks were a major drag on the index. It has become something of a sport to watch Bank of Montreal plumb new depths. In early trading, the beleaguered bank was down another 1.8 per cent, to $41.23.

In the United States, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 120 points, or 1 per cent, to 11,921. No surprise here: Payrolls declined by 63,000, far worse than expected. The broader S&P 500 fell to 1294, down 11 points or 0.8 per cent in early trading. There is sport in watching Citigroup Inc. fall as well. It declined another 2.4 per cent in early trading, falling to $20.67 (U.S.).

Besides being force-fed awful jobs numbers for February, some investors may also be rattled by the fact that the broader S&P 500 broke through an important technical barrier on Thursday, closing lower than its January trough to a new 18-month low – a sign that maybe there is no floor to this stock market correction after all. Now, many investors will be looking at the index's intraday January low as another technical indicator. That low is 1270, or just 24 points away.

In Europe, the selling accelerated after the U.S. jobs numbers were released. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 fell 1.4 per cent and Germany’s DAX index fell 1.8 per cent.