To add depth to the consumer credit version of consumer inclinations in 2015, Gallup’s estimates of daily spending in March came in at $86. That was only $4 greater than February’s $82 which hadn’t rebounded at all from January. In other words, there is “something” wrong with consumers so far in 2015, even as compared to prior years of lethargy. [...]
If there is actually a tight correlation between jobless claims and the Establishment Survey, as I think there is, then we should expect tomorrow’s payroll report to be totally in-line with recent months. That would be despite all the growing negativity in economic accounts elsewhere, but I think it is more and more apparent that trend-cycle analysis (or guesses) is [...]
In viewing incoming data for January, it looked as if the “dollar” being exactly right about the US economy’s place within the falling global economy was increasingly correct. At that time, the declines in many accounts were way beyond even what we saw of 2014’s “snowy” disruption. That itself suggested that any repeat in 2015 was more than simple repetition, [...]
It wasn’t supposed to be the case that China would steal all the attention from Japan. We are only a few days away from QQE’s second anniversary and all expectations were purposely set to be a full-blown revival by now. The dedication and skill with which the Japanese economy was handled was meant to conclusively demonstrate with no debate that [...]
So far the economic retrenchment has persisted into February, outlasting any significant January weather. The latest worrisome figures came in the form of durable goods and especially capital goods. The former is another peg in the consumption side while the latter is one of the few glimpses of wealth creation (if far from a complete one). Both sides, demand and [...]
One of the primary pillars of even the tepid “recovery” of this cycle is undoubtedly auto sales. We can have a debate as to the influence of monetary policy in this arena, especially as auto loans have (along with student loans) been practically the only direct conduit of credit into the real economy. Clearly, despite the heavy flow there, auto [...]
We know that credit and funding markets took a nasty turn in December, but it wasn’t until economic data released just recently that we gained a better appreciation about why that might have been. In the relative blindness of “realtime” such market-driven bearishness could be self-contained within purely financial factors alone, and thus opens the possibility of ambiguity about why the [...]
Part of the rewriting of GDP in the middle of last year involved adding more components that are not directly observable, leaving them susceptible to more imputations and adjustment processes than GDP normally counts. Changing “fixed investment” to include less well-defined concepts like R&D, “intellectual property” and “entertainment” makes sense intuitively until you actually try to piece together how they [...]
Lost amid last week’s stock euphoria was the collapse in both the ISM’s Chicago Business Barometer (which I covered here) and construction spending. While sentiment surveys are hard to judge, it wasn’t a huge intuitive leap to suggest that both data points may be related to the energy sector. While that will remain unanswered for Chicago, the construction figures are [...]
Stocks had a great day today unshaken by whether the manufacturing part of the economy was growing more quickly or at the slowest rate in 13 months. Confusion isn’t part of the asset inflation lexicon. In economic news, the U.S. manufacturing sector had its best gains since October, according to Markit's final Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index that rose to 55.1 [...]
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