Retail sales in June 2016 were up 3.14% from June 2015. That rate is slightly better than the average from the middle of last year, but not significantly so. The 6-month average continues to straddle the 3% range that traditionally marks recessionary circumstances, about 2% less than the average just before the “rising dollar” economy hit in late 2014. Under [...]
Wholesale inventories have ground to a halt, but since wholesale sales have also the inventory imbalance only continues midway already through its second year. Excluding petroleum, the wholesale inventory to sales ratio surged upward starting in November 2014. By the middle of last year, inventory growth had slowed but that only locked the current imbalance into seeming perpetuity. For the [...]
Factory orders declined slightly year-over-year in May 2016, the 18th contraction in the past nineteen months (the only positive was February and its 29th day). On a seasonally adjusted basis, factory orders fell 1% month-over-month to $455 billion. That was less than the $462 billion for March 2011 back when the end of QE2 was a topic for discussion, before [...]
Industrial production fell year-over-year in May 2016 for the ninth consecutive month. At -1.4%, it is the same kind of slow, steady contraction now that we find in so many other places. This is not the typical recession response, instead more consistent with the slowdown turning into serious than just insufficient growth while still at the precipice of potential recession. [...]
Inventory is an exceedingly simple concept spaced between the most basic economic fundamentals. Because the modern economy operates upon mass production, the flow of goods is not direct. Thus, there are structural differences between demand and supply, with inventory as the pivot in between. If end demand rises it still gets filled even though production cannot respond instantaneously (no matter [...]
As with China’s manufacturing, so goes global manufacturing. Rather than rebounding out of 2016’s dismal start, the failure to follow through in April and now May simply proves yet again that nothing has changed. These PMI sentiment surveys are believed to be far more precise than they really are. Even though the ISM Manufacturing PMI, for example, rose slightly to [...]
According to Discern Investment Analytics, the number of retail store closings in the first two months of 2016 was about a third more than the closings in the same two months last year. That’s bad news just in terms of the raw increase, but more so given that there was a wave of shutting retailer outlets last year, too. Store [...]
Unlike retail sales in January, wholesale sales won’t need revisions to become highly negative in either the seasonal or unadjusted versions. On a seasonally-adjusted basis, wholesale sales declined rather sharply in January (-1.35% M/M), the fourth consecutive decline, sixth out of the past seven months and making fourteen of the past eighteen since all this began. On an unadjusted basis, [...]
When Janet Yellen testified to Congress last week, she was as usual careful with her words. Alan Greenspan once called it “mumbling with incoherence” but there is very little left to rambling in Yellen’s predicament. Where Greenspan was once the “maestro” and Bernanke the “hero” Yellen is stuck holding the bag, and I think she knows it. In truth, there [...]
The PPI estimate for China was not a fifth straight -5.9%, instead the estimate for January 2016 was -5.3%; not appreciably different but at least not blatantly sticking with a single number. China’s CPI remained below 2% at just 1.8% in January, showing that as far as calculated “inflation” none of the PBOC’s massive efforts since November last year have [...]
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