Market Summary

So we have the good news, the pace of job losses slowed to their lowest level in a year. However, 6.9 million people have lost their job since the recession began, and we are still months away from having a net job gain. The economy needs to create roughly 125,000 jobs per month.

Wall Street rode high into the long holiday weekend. After a brief back and forth in the premarket, stocks opened higher and stayed positive throughout the session. The Dow rose 96.66, or 1 %, to 9,441.27. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 13.16, or 1.3 %, to 1,016.40, while the Nasdaq composite index added 35.58, or 1.8 %, to 2,018.78. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies rose 8.01, or 1.4 %, to 570.50

Nine of the ten sectors that make up the S&P 500 fell for the week, led by Financials which declined 3.59%. Consumer Staples was the only sector in the black, positive by 0.56%.

Energy didn’t react as positively to the jobs number, as less bad still isn’t good. Light, sweet crude rose 6 cents to settle at $68.02 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

August Employment Situation

U.S. employers cut 216,000 jobs in August, while the unemployment rate rose to a 26-year high. The Labor Department reported the unemployment rate rose to 9.7 % (9.657% to be exact) after dipping to 9.4 % in July and the decline in payrolls was the smallest in a year.

The department revised job losses for June and July to show 49,000 more jobs lost than previously reported. Analysts had expected the unemployment rate to jump to 9.6%.

Its Saturday AKA Roundup of Bank Failures

The number of banks that have failed this year stands at 89 after regulators on Friday shut down banks in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa and Arizona.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took over First Bank of Kansas City, which was based in Kansas City, Mo., and had $16 million in assets and $15 million in deposits. It shut down Sioux City, Iowa-based Vantus Bank, with $458 million in assets and $368 million in deposits.

The FDIC seized two banks in Illinois: Oak Forest-based InBank, with $212 million in assets and $199 million in deposits, and Platinum Community Bank in Rolling Meadows, which had $346 million in assets and $305 million in deposits.

First State Bank in Flagstaff, Ariz., also was shuttered. It had $105 million in assets and deposits totaling $95 million.

All totaled, the latest failures will cost the cash strapped fund of the FDIC some $400 million.