Total construction spending fell considerably in June 2017, according to Census Bureau estimates released yesterday. Seasonally-adjusted, layouts for new construction declined by 1.3% from May. That’s the second time in the last three months there was such a large drop. Year-over-year (unadjusted), total spending grew by just 1.2%, the lowest rate of expansion since November 2011 (subject to revisions, which [...]
In December 2015, automakers were still riding high. Auto sales that year were to be another record, both in terms of units as well as dollars. Americans had spent about $437 billion on new vehicles in those twelve months, up from $407 billion the year before. Though there were notable disturbances throughout especially the second half of 2015, that December [...]
In the midst of revisions season, everything is up for re-evaluation. Some end up as big changes, others mere footnotes. A lot has been revised (lower) about the past few years, particularly surrounding the substantial downturn at the end of 2015. Inflation rates are not among that list. The PCE Deflator has been given only mild benchmark revisions in contrast [...]
For such an important set of data, the PCE stuff continues to suggest a whole lot of capriciousness. There has been a tendency to drastically revise figures such that they change not in the small ways regular revisions are supposed to produce. The whole purpose of especially benchmark revisions is to calculate a more accurate number. In the past few [...]
Activist hedge fund manager Bill Ackman succeeded in 2013 in ousting Procter & Gamble’s CEO Bob McDonald. It was noteworthy at the time because the company issued a strange memo repeating often verbatim answers to questions it posed to itself. Among them was if Mr. McDonald was fired or, as had been relayed publicly, he voluntarily retired. The memo merely [...]
When the Mario Draghi as head of the ECB first introduced negative rates in early June 2014, his reasoning was very clear. As he said in the opening of his statement imposing NIRP on Europe, “Today, we decided on a combination of measures to provide additional monetary policy accommodation and to support lending to the real economy.” The way in [...]
This economic cycle is one of the longest on record for the US, eight years and counting since the end of the last recession. It has also been, as almost everyone knows, a fairly weak expansion, one that has managed to disappoint both bull and bear. Growth has oscillated around a 2% rate for most of the expansion, falling at [...]
Inflation in Europe was in July 2017 once again underwhelming. Eurostat’s HICP inflation index grew at a 1.3% annual rate for the second straight month. Other than for February 2017, the inflation rate has been less than the ECB’s 2% target for four and a half years. During that time, Europe’s central bank has vastly expanded its liquidity facilities (twice) [...]
Real Gross Domestic Product expanded by 2.54% in Q2 2017, below most estimates including the final one from the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model. That latter method was close once again in its final days (+2.8%), but earlier in the quarter was predicting GDP growth of 4.3%. That would have been like what many people were thinking after another awful first [...]
In September 2016, Wells Fargo fired 5,300 employees. These sorts of mass layoffs have become common in banking throughout the post-crisis era, especially those years of the “rising dollar.” This was different, however, as Wells was not cutting back in capacity but dealing with the aftermath of being far too aggressive. These employees were found to have opened secret and [...]
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