Thursday’s retail sales data likely poured more gasoline into the recession-fear fire. The cycle is getting long in the tooth. Risks are rising. The expansion has lasted for nearly a decade. Contraction is just a matter of when not if. … Continued
US stocks took it on the chin last week. Large-caps held up better, but risk aversion was seen elsewhere. The Dow Industrials was essentially unchanged, and the S&P 500 large cap index lost one percent. The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index … Continued
US economic data of late have been coming in strong. Real GDP printed 4.1 percent growth in 2Q18. This was the strongest growth rate in 15 quarters. As of last Friday, the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model expects 4.4 percent growth … Continued
If the Fed moves in September and December, the fed funds rate will be in excess of core inflation. In a leveraged economy, that should begin to bite. The FOMC dot plot expects three more hikes next year. This is … Continued
Major US equity indices all peaked late January – the S&P 500 large cap index, the Dow industrials and the Nasdaq 100 index on the 26th and the Russell 2000 small cap index on the 24th. This was followed by … Continued
With the U.S. unemployment rate at a nearly 17-year low and job growth still healthy, some divergence is popping up in jobs-related data. November created 228,000 non-farm jobs. With one month to go, this amounts to a monthly average of … Continued
Chart 1 shows decent relationship between year-over-year change in the S&P 500 large cap index and the ISM manufacturing index. U.S. manufacturing activity has picked up – from 49.4 last August to 57.5 in February. The 8.3-point six-month jump is … Continued
The usual middle-of-the-road approach. Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen’s Humphrey Hawkins testimony to the Senate yesterday, that is. (She appears before the House later today.) There were no hints as to if she was ready to vote for a rate … Continued
The last time average hourly earnings of U.S. private-sector employees grew with a three handle was April 2009 … means in the current recovery wages are yet to print growth of three percent. December came close, with a year-over-year increase … Continued