Sticking with our recent theme, a big part of what Inflation Hysteria #1 (2017-18) also had going for it was loosened restrictions for US oil producers. Seriously. Legacy of the 1970’s experience depending too much on OPEC, subject to embargoes, American oil companies had been prohibited for decades from exporting oil. Not that it would have mattered before 2014, the [...]
The ISM reported a small decline in its manufacturing PMI today. The index had moved up to 59.3 for the month of October 2020 in what had been its highest since September 2018. For November, the setback was nearly two points, bringing the headline down to an estimate of 57.5.At that level, it really wasn’t any different from where it [...]
The oil market has caught a mild case of the raging disease. Not COVID, rather the purported cure for it. Vaccine-phoria has visited the energy sector and propelled oil prices upward while pulling less contango in the futures curve, awakening this commodity market from its post-August doldrums. It had been that detour in WTI which began to suggest this summer [...]
An “unexpectedly” cool summer that will certainly turn up the heat as the global economy’s winter stubbornly refuses to thaw. We keep getting more and more indications that the economy’s rebound from the depths of April/May slowed way down in and around June/July. That lowered trajectory, while still upward, isn’t nearly enough and it appears to continue all the way [...]
With all these warning signs pointing squarely back to the middle or end of July, it’s pretty clear that “something” changed the momentum maybe even direction of the economy’s reopening rebound. There’s also no question about what one key part of what might have been responsible, thus the quotation marks surrounding the word “something.”The federal government had been handing out [...]
The star of the show once again was the unemployment rate. Since the ratio is a byproduct of the Household Survey, not the Establishment Survey, that means the surprise upside in the other labor survey overshadowed the slowing rate of change in the payroll number everyone usually watches so much more closely. The headline figure gained +1.37mm payrolls (Est. Survey) [...]
Though there’s not much to add, it’s worth bringing this up again. In the era of gigantic positives, why aren't sentiment surveys so much more positive than they are? It's because these PMI numbers aren’t what you’re being told they are. After such a huge contraction, mid-50’s is a bomb; mid-50’s (the best ones) in August 2020 is a real [...]
There is simply no way to spin these figures as anything good. Not just the usual ones were talk about here, but more so some new data that you probably haven’t seen before. Beginning with the regular, it doesn’t matter that the level of initial jobless claims has declined substantially over the past few weeks. The fact of the matter [...]
We have to be somewhat careful in making too much out of statistics taken at extreme times like these. Massive moves can trigger unreliable noise in them. The second quarter of 2020 qualifies in every possible way. And the numbers it has produced are certainly extreme.Late last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) issued its preliminary assessment of labor [...]
I’ve always disliked the ritual of Payroll Friday because that’s what it is. The BLS doesn’t even measure the change in payrolls, for crying out loud. The government attempts to define a very wide interval into which the real labor market may have fallen. Even then it’s nothing like precision, especially at a low 90% confidence interval.And don’t get me [...]
Stay In Touch