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 [...]
Wall Street is predictably overreacting to the unpleasant payroll report. It is understandable in a way since, as noted yesterday, the Establishment Survey and the unemployment rate are all that is left to suggest the economy remains on track and any weakness would be temporary. It was a strained position to begin with, especially since the economy shifted lower almost two [...]
The worst part of this stilted or stunted economy is that it isn’t nearly good enough to produce widespread prosperity (with very real questions as to whether it produces any prosperity at all). It has become self-reinforcing, however, to the point of circular logic. We (economists) are now so conditioned by the low, unstable growth that we are supposed to [...]
With no “unusual” snow or “residual seasonality”, the US economy once again grinds to a halt in Q1 only now with no more reasons to dismiss it. In what has become an annual ritual, GDP barely moves in the quarter immediately following the Christmas holiday. This time, however, it wasn’t just consumers holding back in Q1. The U.S. economy inched [...]
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 [...]
Not to continue beating a dead horse, but I have a stick and the carcass is right in front of me. The entire supply chain inside the US economy is full agreement both on where the economy is right now and, perhaps more importantly, how it came to be that way. Such harmony is not atypical, as synchronicity usually defines [...]
In July last year, the BEA reconfigured its GDP benchmarks to incorporate the results of the comprehensive 2012 Economic Census. That broad and deep survey found much less “recovery” than the BEA had originally anticipated through its system of stochastic predictions. It is believed that these statistical agencies of the government actually measure results in the real economy but in [...]
The “final” estimate for Q4 GDP was uninteresting save the update to corporate profits and cash flow. The upward revision to 1.4% wasn’t really any different than the preliminary or advance estimates, and since 12% of it was simply a guess by the BEA it doesn’t amount to a whole lot of solid analysis especially when in conflict with so [...]
The latest JOLTS update finds total hires in January down by a rather large 372k, leaving the monthly seasonally-adjusted rate at still 5 million. Given that the estimated hires rate increased unusually in December, it seems as if January was the statistical catchup or seasonal give-back. That leaves intact the same sideways pattern that first appeared around October 2014. Throughout [...]
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