Number of the Day

1,700:

Stocks are kicking off August on a bullish note with the Standard & Poor's 500 index crossing the 1,700 milestone for the first time ever.

...All the major U.S. stock gauges hit fresh highs in early trading.

The Dow Jones industrial average jumped more than 145 points, or 0.9%. The Standard & Poor's 500 added 1.1% in its maiden climb above 1,700 and the Nasdaq composite index was up 1.1%.

Investors are in a buying mood a day after the Federal Reserve kept its "easy money" policies steady. Boosting investor sentiment: Thursday's jobless claims figures, which dipped by 19,000 to 326,000.

Super! Good news for everyone! (Except those 326,000 jobless people, and all the other unemployed people, and all the people who are excluded from unemployment stats because they have given up job hunting, or took "early retirement," or who are stay-at-home parents because they can't find work, or who are barely eking by via self-employment and/or freelancing, etc. Not to mention all the people who don't have retirement accounts through their shitty jobs and can't afford to invest privately in the stock market. And everyone else who has no direct investment in the stock market for whatever reason, but is nonetheless still affected by its performance, and has to watch people celebrate how AWESOME the market is doing because we are all still pretending that trickle-down economics works.) BUY! SELL! BULLS AND BEARS AND THINGS!