As news broke that the U.S. jobless rate crossed the dreaded 10 percent mark, many investors braced for the market's reaction. The response to word that unemployment reached levels not seen since 1983? The Dow Jones industrial average closed up 17.46 points to 10,023.42 and the S&P 500 ended the day at 1,069.30, up 2.67 points. Not exactly a sell-off.

So did news on Friday of 10.2 percent unemployment represent a buying opportunity? For those who follow market trends, it did.

Most mainstream academic and government economists -- elites, we should note, who are generally well-protected from the vagaries of the real world -- are united in the view that massive federal deficits to fund stimulus programs are not just a good thing but a necessary thing.

Economist J. Brad DeLong, for example, recently raked a journalist over the coals for suggesting deficits might cause long-term harm to the economy. Accusing the journalist of "not doing the arithmetic," the economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley launched into a questionable string of assumptions to reach the dubious conclusion that massive federal borrowing will add a mere $5 per year to every taxpayers' future tax burden.

U.S. consumers' efforts to pay down their credit card debts continue. Outstanding U.S. consumer credit fell by $14.8 billion or at a 7.2 percent annual rate in September -- the eighth straight monthly credit decline, the U.S. Federal Reserve announced Friday.

Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News had expected to see a September consumer credit contraction of $10 billion, after a revised $9.9 billion decline in August, and a $19 billion plunge in July. Consumer credit is down 4.7 percent compared to a year ago, and balances have fallen in 12 of the past 14 months.

In September, total outstanding consumer credit, including revolving and non-revolving credit, declined to $2.46 trillion, or by 4.7 percent compared to a year ago, the Fed said. In Q3, total outstanding debt declined at a 6.1 percent annual rate; it fell at 6.6 percent and 3.7 percent annual rates in Q2 and Q1, respectively.

Bears who warn the U.S. stock market has gone too far too fast -- the broad Standard & Poor's 500 index is up 18 percent year to date -- may not get much vindication anytime soon. Investors should see stocks continue to rally as long as corporate profits keep recovering, says market expert Joseph Mezrich (pictured), Nomura Securities International's head of quantitative research.

And the signs look good. The estimated earnings growth rate for the Standard & Poor's 500 during the fourth quarter is 216 percent, according to Thomson Reuters. Even stripping out the volatile financial sector, the other eight out of nine sectors are expected to show a blended growth rate of 7 percent. But that's still double the 3.5 percent economic growth of the U.S. economy in the third quarter. And Mezrich says it's the fact that profit growth is outpacing the U.S. economy that stocks have rallied ahead of an economic recovery.

When it comes to allocating scarce public resources, large corporations seem to have the upper hand in the US. We already know that many powerful companies, particularly the Wall Street investment banks, having gotten plenty of Washington cash. Now it looks like they're getting first dibs on the scarce H1N1 vaccine as well.

If I remember correctly, last fall the problems with the financial sector nearly cratered the global economy -- what with the $30 trillion in lost stock market value and over a trillion dollars in bank write-offs. As I've written before, Wall Street accounts for 0.057 percent of our population, but because it has given $5 billion to Washington politicians and lobbyists over the last decade, the government poured trillions of dollars into bailing it out after its little collapse last year.

New York gold futures topped $1,100 an ounce for the first time ever as investors continued to funnel funds into safe-haven gold amid the slumping world economy.

Most-active gold for December delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange's Comex division reached the $1,100 mark about one year and eight months after it topped $1,000 for the first time in March 2008.

The benchmark contract posted a new closing record of $1,089.30 the previous day, ending higher for four days in a row.

As the full extent of the Galleon Group's insider trading comes to light, its story is starting to resemble something out of the movies. Although Raj Rajaratnam's house has already been compared to the homes in both The Sopranos and Goodfellas, the sad truth is that the real-life criminal ring lacks both the class of Tony Soprano's gang and the gravitas of Joe Pesci's. As details emerge, the whole mess seems to fall closer to the cartoonish excess of Animal House.

The central member of the gang -- the Otter, if you will -- may well be Zvi "The Octopussy" Goffer. Robert Khuzami, director of the Securites and Exchange Commission's Division of Enforcement, noted Thursday that Goffer got his James Bond–originated nickname "because of his reputation for having arms in so many sources of inside information." Goffer used his web of spies to cut trades both at Galleon and at his previous employer, the Schottenfeld Group.

You may find it hard to believe, but the Congressional Oversight Panel released its monthly report Friday and said that it had found no "significant flaws in Treasury's implementation" of TARP bailout programs. In fact, the panel found that so far, the Treasury Department has collected $17.4 billion in fees and taken only up to $2 million in losses from the Debt Guarantee Program that backs the debt which banks issued.

At the height of the program, the federal government (and ultimately U.S. taxpayers) guaranteed or insured $4.5 trillion in face value assets, with the majority of the guarantees backing money market accounts that held high concentrations of government debt in the form of Treasury securities. So the added exposure was not for the full face value, since government debt is already backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.

It finally happened. After months of anticipation and trepidation, the nation's unemployment rate inched into double digits, reaching 10.2 percent in October, after employers cut 190,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported Friday. The increase topped analyst expectations of 175,000 lost positions and a rise in the jobless rate to 9.9 percent. But now that the 10-percent mark has been breached, what does it mean for investors, and more important, those looking for work?

The unemployment rate has surpassed 10 percent for the first time since 1983 - and is likely to go higher.

Nearly 16 million people can't find jobs even though the worst recession since the Great Depression has apparently ended. The Labor Department said Friday that the economy shed a net total of 190,000 jobs in October, less than the downwardly revised 219,000 lost in September. August job losses were also revised lower, to 154,000 from 201,000.

U.S. stocks are set to start the day on an upbeat note, keeping with the momentum from Thursday's two percent surge. The focus this morning is on government's jobs report to be released at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. While there have been signs of growth and recovery in the economy, the labor market has been one of the biggest concerns, as the Federal Reserve statement from Wednesday attests. The employment data will also allow investors to gauge how the upcoming shopping season will fare.

[Update 8:33 a.m.: Stock futures changed course after the government reported the unemployment rate rose to 10.2 percent, above the 9.9 percent expected. Nonfarm payrolls dropped by 190,000 in October, bringing to total number of jobs lost in the recession to 7.3 million.]

More here: Before the bell: Futures higher ahead of jobs report

Unbelievable. Guess which is the best-performing S&P 500 stock since Obama was elected.

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Good thing the FTC is protecting us from those monopolistic robber barons in the pretzel industry.

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Hedge fund manager James Matthews really hates me.

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I recently delivered a Webinar, Economic Outlook: U.S. and Key Industries, and got asked a very interesting question -- How will we know the recession is over? With Thursday's report that productivity grew 9.5 percent while the number of people added to the unemployment rolls hit 512,000 in the last week, the signals are not exactly clear.

But my answer to the question is that people can follow eight indicators to know whether we're out of a recession. My best guess is that these indicators will not all flash a green light suddenly or at the same time. But if you follow these indicators over the next few months and monitor changes in them closely, you may get some meaningful signs of whether the recession is over.

Before jumping into these indicators, there is one more thing. As I've posted, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) officially decides when recessions begin and end and they dated the current one from December 2007 -- the month that jobs started shrinking. So that is one of the indicators that I am tracking. But without further ado, here are the eight:

Asia's major indexes rose Friday, with Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index climbing 1.6 percent to close at 21,830, Japan's Nikkei Index increasing 0.7 percent to end the day at 9,789 and China's Shanghai Composite Index adding 0.3 percent to settle at 3,164.

Yet another successful IPO sent shares of Greens Holdings Ltd. up 12.3 percent, making it the third Hong Kong company to rise on its debut this week. The company provides energy efficiency solutions and products, including wind power equipment. Luxury residential developer Evergrande Real Estate Group, which began trading earlier this week, fell 2.6 percent today, and menswear company Trinity Ltd, which also kicked off trading this week, lost 3.9 percent of its recent gains.

British Airways lost $485 million for the six months that ended in September. The airline's CEO Willie Walsh told the BBC that this has been the "most difficult year in the history of British Airways". BA is planning to cut 3,000 more workers in an attempt to return to profitability, but the firm's outlook for an improvement in passenger traffic is bleak.

The BA news should not be seen in isolation. After a brief period in which analysts and traders hoped for a full-scale turnaround in the global airlines industry, those sentiments have faded. The dismay is reflected in the stock prices of US-based airlines. Shares of American (AMR) are down about 25 percent in the last month, and most stocks in the sector are off more than 10 percent.