In her testimony before Congress in July, Janet Yellen laid out the same talking points that have been propagated onto Americans time and time again these past eight years. The economy is moving forward and the Fed is doing and has done everything it can, and that there are “green shoots” still though no full and mature growth. Low oil [...]
Retail sales for June were revised upward by a significant amount, almost $2 billion, which has had the effect only of shuffling that month’s order among the worst. With higher auto sales growth, June overall retail sales were 3.31% year-over-year which remains about half of what would be considered healthy. For July, retail sales decelerated again, to just 2.86%, which [...]
The problem with sentiment surveys is, as I am becoming a broken record, that they don’t often mean what they are taken to mean. At best, they are relative measures of changes and potentially, if captured and refigured just right, inflections. With innumerable problems encapsulated into not just their construction but the idea of a PMI in the first place, [...]
Sticking with purely financial expression of the eurodollar standard it is easy at times to forget such monetary influence has very real consequences. That is true in the US in particular, as even though the recovery is both deficient and waning it isn’t the disaster it is in other, connected places. It was, after all, the rise of the eurodollar [...]
I typically stay away from sentiment indicators and measures of “confidence” not just because they are of dubious construction but they often don’t mean what they are taken for. In the case of consumer confidence, you get both problems simultaneously particularly at the ends of each cycle. In other words, just as “confidence” is at its greatest point and economists, [...]
When US retail sales jumped in May on seasonal adjustments alone, economists and mainstream commentary lost all composure as they were certain that meant the “slump” was over and the dominant narrative would continue. The same occurred in Europe over a slight pickup in overall lending, not even in the household or business sectors, which was proclaimed as nothing but [...]
Last month’s retail sales report for May was taken as the definitive sign that the slump had passed and that the conventional view of the jobs market was finally, if surprisingly belatedly, taking shape. It did not matter to economists that the only basis for that interpretation was seasonal adjustments, which had produced a huge disparity with the unadjusted set. [...]
Gap announced another round of store closings, about 175 this time which is a significant chunk of its once-leading asset base. The company’s struggles aren’t new, having closed 200 stores only back in 2011. Since Gap was one of the first businesses to sign on for a higher wage base, you have to wonder how much of that was simple [...]
While the latest business inventory estimates are not yet updated for May, only through April, there is still a great deal of consistency provided by the top to bottom shifts in the economic supply chain. It usually takes an inventory build of tremendous disproportion to trigger the kinds of cutbacks and downstream negative pressures that amount to a recession. The [...]
Another contraction in US Industrial Production has extended the slump to half a year. That includes, perhaps more importantly, serious and continued erosion in capacity utilization. There were some minor upward revisions in prior months though nothing to a significant degree, leaving May IP up only 1.37% year-over-year. That is the slowest pace of the entire “recovery” period, and a [...]
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