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 [...]
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, [...]
The wholesale level of the supply chain continued its divergence, though it seems increasingly likely that inventories have at least rolled over even if they are still building. Sales fell by 4.2% unadjusted year-over-year while inventories were up only 1.8%. That was the slowest inventory growth since the summer of 2010, but it still leaves the inventory gap as unbelievably [...]
Despite continued cuts in production and supply chain activity, inventory through November persists in great imbalance. With December retail sales demonstrating a Christmas sales season only worse in 2008 and 2009, that isn’t like to have changed. It’s not as if manufacturers and imports have been robust to build that much inventory; production is already in clear recession. The only [...]
Lost amidst the celebrations about the new auto sales record achieved in 2015 was that sales in December were more than disappointing. There were an overwhelming number of articles on the subject, and nearly all of them identical in focusing almost exclusively on 2015 as a whole rather than how sales were at the end. It is entirely understandable, not [...]
The Fed’s industrial production series also includes estimates on total motor vehicle assemblies. Auto sales in general have been one of the only bright spots in the economy, especially since the 2012 slowdown (even though it has been boosted artificially via credit far, far more than income gains). Given that trend, it is still difficult to assess whether activity in [...]
One of the problems with GDP as a statistical Swiss-Army knife for economic considerations is its very methodology. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t good and sound reasons for that kind of construction and presentation, only that in making such choices some elements are left out; even important pieces. In this case, I refer to the double counting problem which [...]
The wholesale economic problem widened again in October, even as the Commerce Dept. reported yesterday wholesale inventories rose at the slowest pace in two years. Overall, non-adjusted inventories rose by 3.6% compared to October 2014, which was less than half the rate of the summer of 2014. But that slowing inventory (which is still GDP negative in the second derivative [...]
The only piece of the GDP revision to note is that the BEA is still having great difficulty estimating inventory. That isn’t surprising since businesses in this area are behaving far different than any expectation, even factoring the difficulty of the “recovery” environment. That leaves instead only Janet Yellen’s continuous pleading about the surge in consumer spending that never seems [...]
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