US Industrial Production contracted for the fourth consecutive month in February, falling 1.03% year-over-year. It was the third drop of more than 1% in those four months, leaving the 6-month average now at -0.57%. A single month of -1% is usually associated with recession, let alone three of the past four and a negative six-month average. Except for one four-month [...]
Last week the Federal Reserve updated its quarterly Financial Accounts of the United States Z1 (formerly Flow of Funds) meaning that we can recheck valuation levels of the stock bubble from alternate points of view (data). The most common valuation given by the report is Tobin’s Q which compares the estimated value of corporate equities (liability) to nonfinancial corporate business [...]
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, [...]
It is increasingly difficult to account for the estimates provided by various statistical agencies when there is no consistency not just with other non-governmental series but within each. The latest retail sales report has nothing in common with anything including itself. The mess features major revisions for the prior two months that simply leave the calendar as demarcation. Unadjusted retail [...]
Industrial production for the combined January/February period in China fell to just 5.4%, matching the lowest growth rate of the past fourteen years. Only the January/February 2002 IP rate was lower, but that was a single data point giving way to the rising financialization of the late eurodollar period. In 2016, these decelerations are commonplace, determined, and have no end [...]
The only immediate silver lining may be in the end the most fruitful of long-term prospects. Central bankers have done us a profound favor by overplaying their hand time and again. The catalog of false statements and expectations is long and getting longer. The ECB then assured “us” that this was different and that the LTRO’s, massive as they were, [...]
Just a few weeks ago FactSet was reporting analysts’ estimates for Q1 2016 EPS were looking to be a 6.9% decline year-over-year. Their latest update now suggests -8.0%, as the deterioration in earnings outlook is becoming the most significant part of the trend. During the first two months of Q1 2016, analysts lowered earnings estimates for companies in the S&P [...]
Revolving consumer credit turned upward in March last year, which signaled to economists that the true end of the Great Recession was at hand. The largest impediment to the monetary version of the recovery was the “debt hangover” from the mortgage surge during the housing mania. Consumers, rightfully cautious after that disastrous experience, spent the early years of the “recovery” [...]
The fiscal year for retailers ended in January with nothing like what it was supposed to be. Still, as always, the suggestions remained that a rebound in consumerism would be before too long. If it wasn’t to be evident right away in February, the start of the 2016 fiscal year was at least supposed to be back in the plus [...]
Going only from the conventional interpretation of the optimistic 242,000 in payroll gains Friday, it is still remarkable how more than one-fifth of those purported job creations in February were due to activity in retail trade alone. The monthly variation estimate for the retail sector (not including wholesale or transportation of goods) was an especially robust +55k even though the [...]
Stay In Touch