Wholesale sales rose 5.3% in February 2017 year-over-year after jumping by more than 12% in January on oil effects. Like calculated inflation rates, wholesale sales are for now marginally determined by energy price comparisons as well as calendar effects. February 2017 had one fewer day than February 2016, which according to the Census Bureau’s seasonal adjustments played some significant role [...]
The ISM Manufacturing Index declined slightly for March 2017, pulling back by 0.5 points after registering a multi-year high in February. The difference between the index and troubling auto sales, for example, is another reminder of what is truly a large disparity between economic statistics and sentiment. The ISM version of a PMI is considered more reliable because it asks [...]
JD Power and LMC Automotive were expecting total new vehicle sales to rise 2.4% year-over-year in March, a small turnaround of sorts for the way auto sales have gone so far in 2017. Both new retail auto sales as well as overall sales were slightly negative January and February, so any positive number would be a welcome change. Given the [...]
The Fed did, as expected, hike rates at their last meeting. And interestingly, interest rates have done nothing but fall since that day. As I predicted in the last BWER, Greenspan's conundrum is making a comeback. The Fed can do whatever it wants with Fed funds - heck, barely anyone is using it anyway - but they can't control what [...]
There has always been something like Newton’s third law observed in the business cycles of the US and other developed economies. In what is, or was, essentially symmetry, there had been until 2008 considerable correlation between the size, scope, and speed of any recovery and its antecedent downturn, or even slowdown. The relationship was so striking that it moved Milton [...]
The ISM Manufacturing PMI registered 57.7 in February 2017, the highest value since August 2014 (revised). It was just slightly less than that peak in the 2014 “reflation” cycle. Given these comparisons, economic narratives have been spun further than even the past few years where “strong” was anything but. The ISM’s gauge of orders increased to the highest level in [...]
China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) on November 11, 2001. Its membership took a decade and a half to achieve, no small wonder given that when it started the process the country looked nothing like it did when it was complete. Even by 2001, the Chinese economy was growing fast, but that was nothing compared to what it was [...]
Ross Perot famously declared the “giant sucking sound” in the 1992 Presidential campaign. The debate over NAFTA did not end with George H. W. Bush’s defeat, as it simmered in one form or another for much of the 1990’s. Curiously, however, it seemed almost perfectly absent during the 2000’s, the very decade in which Perot’s prophecy came true. Americans didn’t [...]
Industrial Production in the United States was flat in January 2017, following in December the first positive growth rate in over a year. The monthly estimates for IP are often subject to greater revisions than in other data series, so the figures for the latest month might change in the months ahead. Still, even with that in mind, there is [...]
Factory orders rose 2.0% in December 2016 year-over-year (NSA), the fourth positive number in the last five months. In what is a perfect commentary on the sorrowful state of the economy, it was highest growth rate since September 2014. It seems increasingly likely that the manufacturing recession attached to the “rising dollar”, the one that created a near-recession for the [...]
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