After coming under pressure for months, the ratio of inventories to sales has slightly risen since bottoming last November. It is worth watching. US real GDP growth decelerated to 2.9 percent in 4Q17. This followed growth of 3.2 percent in … Continued
After healthy growth last three quarters, the U.S. economy is in deceleration, magnitude and duration notwithstanding. On Wednesday, the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model was forecasting 1Q18 real GDP growth of 1.9 percent, revised down from 2.5 percent, reflecting this week’s … Continued
There are signs growth is decelerating, but from a healthy level. Data relating to orders and inventories do not yet seem to be a problem, but worth watching. Most of this week’s economic data offered more of a downside surprise … Continued
Thanks to faster growth in the second half last year, inventory is getting wrung out of the system. It is probably only a matter of time accumulation occurs again. In 3Q17, U.S. real GDP grew at an annual rate of … Continued
Tuesday was J.P. Morgan’s (JPM) annual investor day. Bloomberg pointed out that CFO Marianne Lake talked about loans depleting a little bit – the growth rate, that is. Core loans were up 15 percent last year. She sees 10 percent … Continued
That the green line in Chart 1 is increasingly taking the form of a coiled spring is non-debatable. That the longer it stays compressed in oversold territory, the higher the odds of a spike higher is non-debatable. What is debatable … Continued
Depending on what data point we are looking at, U.S. inventory ranges from inflated to balanced. In the third and fourth quarters last year, inventory reduction took away 0.71 percent and 0.22 percent from real GDP growth, respectively (Chart 1). … Continued
NYSE margin debt dropped 2.5 percent month-over-month in December, to $461.2 billion. The S&P 500 declined 1.8 percent in the month. Regardless if margin debt followed stocks lower or it was the other way round, what matters is that momentum … Continued
Stanley Fischer, Federal Reserve vice chair, last week stated that U.S. inflation should rebound next year. As things stand now, government data do not show much inflation. In September, consumer prices, measured by the consumer price index, were unchanged in … Continued
Around the August lows in U.S. equities, several sentiment indicators looked washed out. For instance, the bulls’ count in Investors Intelligence’s survey dropped to 24.7 percent in the September 29th week – the lowest since late December 2008 (although bears … Continued