Goldilocks, We Hardly Knew Ye!

Just yesterday, the market surged on a jump in productivity and declining jobless claims. This morning, a slight miss on the October employment report and we're set to tumble once again.

As I have said in recent radio reports, this market has all the emotional stability of John & Kate Plus Eight!

When combing through October report, it is not as bad as the market response would suggest. True, the unemployment report has jumped to 10.2%, the highest since April 1983. And the economy lost 190,000 jobs.

Still, prior months were revised upward, making the three-month average show improvement.

What today's data reinforce is the notion that the Fed is on hold for the foreseeable future, an argument I have been making for months, despite numerous protestations among the inflation hawks to the contrary.

Stock-index futures are pulling back, though I wouldn't be surprised to see a rally by the end of the day, given the market's recent history.

What is most interesting is the new and pronounced divergence between gold and oil. Gold is closing in on $1,100 an ounce, while oil is dropping more than 2%.

The break in the oil-gold linkage underscores another point I have recently made. Gold is rising as a safety play, or a hedge against financial or paper assets, not as a harbinger of future inflationary pressures.

This is a key distinction that gold bugs simply refuse to make, suggesting that gold is discounting hyper-inflation that will eventually, some day, some way, result from the Fed's accommodative monetary policies.

This is simply not the case, otherwise all commodities would be following gold's lead. Soft commodities, like grains continue to collapse amid bumper harvests, while other raw materials prices are advancing on faux Chinese demand. (Stockpiling commodities is not the same as using them. The Chinese may be spending money on importing raw materials, but it does not mean there is end-user demand for the goods. Simply consider Beijing a "buffer stock manager" for the world's industrial metals.

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Ron Insana has returned to CNBC as a senior contributor to the nation's premier business news network. Prior to his return, Insana was a managing director at SAC Capital Advisers, a $12 billion hedge fund run by Steven A. Cohen. Insana was the president and CEO of Insana Capital Partners, a $120 million fund of funds manager, from March 2006 through August 2008. For over two decades, Insana has been a familiar face on business television, spending 17 years as a veteran anchor at CNBC. Before working at CNBC, he worked as managing editor and senior anchor for the Financial News Network, where he began his career in 1984 as a production assistant. He graduated with honors from California State University at Northridge.