The payroll report missed badly, as the headline “job creation” number gained only 38k in May 2016. That was the lowest monthly gain of the entire “recovery.” Last month’s figure, which had already caused significant angst, was revised even lower to just 123k. The mainstream is predictably apoplectic, and why wouldn’t it be? After all, month after month after month [...]
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 [...]
The ISM Chicago Business Barometer PMI fell back below 50 again in May, the ninth time in the past sixteen months that the index came out under the supposed dividing line. It is more likely, however, that US businesses especially in manufacturing just don’t know what to make of the past year and a half or so, and have switched [...]
When I started in this business more than twenty years ago, I fully expected to be a profession investor in the purest sense of the term. I envisioned spending my days tearing apart corporate financials, especially balance sheets, and matching them to common sense expectations of new products and imaginative advances. It was the 1990’s, after all, and everything seemed [...]
As if something out of bad dream, the economy continues to shrink. Actually, the economy has been shrunken this whole time, it is only the full recovery narrative that has shriveled as each drastic data revision blasts apart what little is left of the positivity. We are made to believe that government data providers go out into the economy and [...]
New home sales surged in April to 619k SAAR. That was the highest rate, by far, since January 2008 more than eight years ago. It was also the biggest monthly gain in twenty-four years, which either suggests home sales are more than rebounding or casts doubt upon the quality of the data. Economists left no uncertainty as to which way [...]
While Markit’s economic sentiment surveys had been perhaps a touch more optimistic about the state of the world than others or other data, May has been a rough month for that comparison. Again, it’s not the absolute number calculated for each survey but rather the relative direction and, in these cases, the uniformity of that direction or pattern. Japan: PMI [...]
It is easy to make jokes about the BEA’s newfound respect for “residual seasonality” that in the words of CNBC’s chief economist makes each Q1 appear to be a “different economy altogether”, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to it if in a far different manner than the mainstream would ever contemplate. There clearly is and has been for [...]
Home construction estimates continue to suggest the same kinds of economic imbalances unchanged from last year. While construction of single family homes had been rising, that increase was not nearly as widespread and voluminous to indicate that the real estate market had been restored by full economic restoration (jobs, jobs, jobs). Apartment construction, on the other hand, has been scaled [...]
There is a great deal that is wrong with mainstream economic commentary, starting with its unwavering devotion to orthodox economics and unshakable faith in their “stimulus.” No matter how little is actually stimulated there is never any doubt that the media will simultaneously forget the last one while lavishing praise on the next one. It is, however, the actual economic [...]
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