One good, one bad and by the end more the latter since the former simply bucked the trend, almost alone as an outlier (among outliers). The day started out with European deflationary pressures putting a spike on UST and related sovereign bond prices then quickly substantiated when ADP reported (830am EDT) its estimates for private payrolls during July (this was [...]
Global factors, meaning that the wave of significantly higher deflationary potential (therefore, diminishing inflationary chances which were never good to begin with) in global bond yields the past five months have seemingly focused on troubles brewing outside the US. Overseas turmoil, it was called back in 2015, leaving by default a picture of relative American strength and harmony.The rest of [...]
Completing the monthly cycle, the ISM released its estimates for non-manufacturing in the US during the month of June 2021. The headline index dropped nearly four points, more than expected. From 64.0 in May, at 60.1 while still quite high it’s the implication of being the lowest in four months which got so much attention. Consistent with IHS Markit’s estimates [...]
Six months ago, the US was still reporting 226K new cases of COVID a day, a rate that would peak in the first half of January at over 300k. Daily deaths also peaked in those first two weeks of the new year at over 4000. The economy was still struggling to recover, most restaurants surviving on takeout traffic, and no [...]
Payrolls for the month of June were a mixed bag, in that the payroll data was better than expected at the same time nothing else was. After a couple months of ho-hum gains for the Establishment Survey, government hiring (mostly) boosted the latest monthly figure to +853,000. This brings the 6-month average up to +543,000, which is either really good [...]
I told you last week that there were strange things going on in the labor market but I had no idea how much of an understatement that really was. Much of last week's economic focus was on the inflation report but I think the JOLTS report may turn out to be more significant. Inflation was indeed pretty hot year over [...]
It wasn’t all that long ago when the media began to fill itself up with one story after another about how huge looming inflationary pressures were causing the entire “market” to rethink its lengthy and determined anti-reflationary stance. Back in March, for instance, S&P had joined this chorus by zeroing in on eurodollar futures, of all instruments, and coming back [...]
April 2021’s payroll estimate (CES) was the “bad” one; at a revised +278,000 it was “supposed” to have been significantly better than the “good” one for March (+785,000, revised). Near three hundred thousand in any month before 2020 would’ve been celebrated as a near miracle (that’s just how bad the labor market has been for a long time). What made [...]
We got another disappointing employment report last week. Well, that's what everyone said anyway, that the complete WAG by the BLS that the US economy added 559,000 jobs in May was below expectations and disappointing. I suppose it is a tad disappointing but I find it hard to lament the fact that a half-million Americans found jobs last month. There [...]
February’s cold winter blast throughout the Southern United States was supposed to have been the extent of the weakness. The unusual and unusually severe freeze caused a great deal of havoc, making its way very quickly into economic data. The recovery was said to have been on a winning streak (vaccines, gov’t payments, etc.) so it seemed the easiest correlation [...]
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