No matter how bad the economy seems to get elsewhere in various data series, the unemployment rate and the common assessment of the labor market (provided by the Establishment Survey) usually prevails. It has become almost a template where any description of the offending economic account will attach some version of, “X was down unexpectedly but should only be temporary [...]
As the major stock indices overtake or threaten psychological round numbers again (S&P 500 2,100; DJIA 18,000), they have done so with the same problem as occurred in 2015. Stocks have been overvalued for some time in historical comparison especially after QE3 and QE4, but it was supposed to be in anticipation of the full recovery that QE would make. [...]
Economic Reports Scorecard Survey based economic reports continue to run counter to real world, actual data. Since the real data tends to lag, an optimist would probably take this as good news. A pessimist would dismiss it altogether as useless survey based data. Me? I'm a realistic optimist. I see the survey based data as potentially positive since attitude and [...]
US industrial production fell yet again in March to (benchmark revised) -2% year-over-year. With updated revisions, the contraction in IP now extends seven months rather than what would have been just five under the prior assumptions. As anticipated yesterday, auto production was a leading factor in the retreat. Manufacturing output decreased 0.3 percent in March. The production of durables moved [...]
What is most amazing about the current “manufacturing recession” is that it has occurred while automobile production has remained rather stout. That would suggest the state of production beyond motor vehicles is much worse than the headline contraction rates. However, that might all be changing as we know “something” is amiss in the auto segment. Inventories of all kinds of [...]
Given the revisions to wholesale sales (downward) and inventories (upward), we knew that the overall inventory imbalance for the whole supply chain would be pushed up somewhat. Total Business Inventory to Sales was 1.41 in February, the second consecutive month at that extreme. And it really is an extreme since the last time we saw such imbalance was November 2008 [...]
Calendar effects, base effects, and holidays continued to plague retail sales estimates. Where February 2016 included a 29th day of extra selling/buying, March finds an early Easter holiday relative to last year (it was in April). The result is difficult comparisons where the unadjusted series is not measuring underlying consumer growth but these other factors. That should change, however, in [...]
Last year, economists were fed up with winter. They had had enough of Q1’s always lagging, threatening to upend the idea that there is a solid and improving recovery. To drop a negative GDP quarter into that mix was the final straw, since negative quarters are exceedingly rare – they actually don’t occur outside of recession. In the four decades [...]
The stock market is still viewed as if it were a discounting mechanism, a system where information is processed and priced to deliver insight about the fundamental state of liquidity, markets, and the economy. That view has always been debatable, but never more so than the whole of this century so far. What were share prices suggesting, fundamentally, in March [...]
On average, pig prices in China are about 50% higher to start this year than last. At about 25RMB per kg, prices are already above the seasonal surge that typically occurs during late summer. Last year, as pig prices started this huge run, wholesale pork jumped from a low of about 17RMB per kg at the start of April 2015 [...]
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