Quick hits on a major Thursday economic news blitz
Quick hits on a major Thursday economic news blitz
There has been a ton of significant economic news this morning. I’m not going to be able to get to all or even most of it in depth. So I am going to leave a quick rundown here.
Starting with the positive:
-nominal retail sales up +0.6%, up +0.3% in real terms, up +0.2% Per Capita. This is another new high and suggests the US consumer continues to be in good shape (relatively speaking). Note that much of this apparently has to do with Amazon “Prime Day” purchases, and if the seasonal adjustments are off, this could easily be a false positive.
-Both the NY and Philly Fed indexes higher, including new orders for both. No indication here that manufacturing is rolling over.
-The manufacturing component of industrial production higher, again suggesting that manufacturing is not rolling over (although this is still below its December high point).
The negative:
– overall industrial production was negative – again! Industrial production as a whole has remained in a decline off its high in December of last year. This is the premier coincident economic indicator, even more than payrolls.
– initial jobless claims higher YoY on both a weekly and monthly measure. It is not more than 10% higher than its recent lows, so overall is a neutral not a negative.
– the 2 year to 10 year treasury spread briefly inverted again this morning, although once again it has rebounded to positive.
-a MAJOR negative: unit labor costs for the last five years revised higher, meaning that adjusted corporate profits (a long leading indicator) peaked back in 2014, and were almost 15% lower than that as of Q1 of this year. The placeholder proprietors income is also slightly lower through Q2 than its peak in Q4 of last year.
I’ll try to post one or two things in detail later.
Meh, the Philly Fed has been redic high since 2017 is full of shit. NY Fed was basically the same as the previous month(higher, it really wasn’t). Both of them are done by Registered Republicans(as is the ISM).
I think these soft survey’s have problems and the producers they represent are lying. They clearly should be mildly contracting and since they aren’t, are full of it with the Philly Fed taking the cake.
With the beginning of auto incentive pullout and balance sheet repair starting, it will be interesting how things go in the future. Auto Sales are way too high with those collapsing balance sheets. They need to get down to 15 just to stop the bleeding. How fast that happens will be interesting.
Mr NDD must have read different reports than i did…i’m clearly seeing retail sales up 0.7%, so his +0.6% must be referencing some subset of that, or be a typo..
https://www.census.gov/retail/marts/www/marts_current.pdf
meanwhile, the manufacturing index of industrial production decreased by 0.4% to 103.4 in July, after June’s manufacturing index was revised from 105.2 to 105.1, May’s manufacturing index was revised from 104.8 to 104.5, and April’s manufacturing index was revised from 104.6 to 104.3, leaving the manufacturing index down 0.5% from a year ago, having fallen 1.2% since December….
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/G17/Current/default.htm
maybe he should take his time, rather than trying to be so quick..