The last few pieces of data for Q3 more than suggest the US economy faltered in August/September. That trend would be alarming on its own had it occurred in a financial vacuum (as if ceteris paribus actually existed), but following along against the “dollar” is especially so. There was the initial, large decline in early 2015 that “unexpectedly” shocked economists [...]
Durable goods continue to contract, with August down year-over-year in both shipments and orders now. New orders have been contracting since February (with January barely positive) at an almost steady rate near -3% the last few months, while shipments did not see a negative rate until May (and were slightly positive again in June). In capital goods, the pattern is [...]
With back-to-school shopping falling apart, the focus turns quickly to the Christmas season once more. That is fully expected, lest anyone dwell too long on the August spending figures and begin to see through the “strong” economy. August retail sales – as expected – showed the effects of slow mall traffic and comparisons with very strong August results a year [...]
If we go by the track of the “dollar” in setting economic expectations, we would expect to have seen a noticeable drop in economic activity in the first part of the year followed by a very tepid rebound lasting only a few months (“rebound” is too charitable of a qualifier, more like “not getting directly worse”). The ugly appearance of [...]
If on the fence trying to decide whether surging job openings or tailing hiring is the true representation of the economy (recognizing that these are not mutually exclusive propositions, just that it isn’t very likely they both coexist in anything but subjectively statistical fancy) Gallup just offered far more of the latter. Should actual job openings hold some kind of [...]
At some point, these continuous divergences between seasonally-adjusted extrapolations and unadjusted year-over-year comparisons will cease to provide so much apparent relief. Time after time, the smallest jump in the monthly variation is taken as cause for completely discarding all prior economic worries even though the more measured and consistent unadjusted growth rates continue to press downward; especially since time and [...]
Retail sales for June were revised upward by a significant amount, almost $2 billion, which has had the effect only of shuffling that month’s order among the worst. With higher auto sales growth, June overall retail sales were 3.31% year-over-year which remains about half of what would be considered healthy. For July, retail sales decelerated again, to just 2.86%, which [...]
I typically stay away from sentiment indicators and measures of “confidence” not just because they are of dubious construction but they often don’t mean what they are taken for. In the case of consumer confidence, you get both problems simultaneously particularly at the ends of each cycle. In other words, just as “confidence” is at its greatest point and economists, [...]
The benchmark revisions (trend-cycle) to durable goods left us with a smaller estimated economy but that wasn’t supposed to be a problem because all that matters supposedly is what comes next. In other words, the cycle was already deficient so the scale of that deficiency was not meant to suggest anything about the next phase, according to economic projections. If [...]
Japanese household spending increased 5.5% in nominal terms in May; 4.8% in real spending growth. That was the first monthly increase since November and since it was a positive number, and not as typically close to zero, it is being hailed as another great sign of QQE success. With Q1 GDP revised up to nearly 5%, economists are back to [...]
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