According to the movie The Princess Bride, the worst classic blunder anyone can make is to get involved in a land war in Asia. No kidding. The second is something about Sicilians and death. There is also, I’ve come to learn, an unspoken third which cautions against chasing down and then trying to break down seasonal adjustments in economic data.Some [...]
Retail sales growth in February 2017 was going to be low by virtue of its comparison to February 2016 and the extra day in that month. The Census Bureau’s autoregressive models are supposed to normalize just these kinds of calendar irregularities so that we can make something close to apples to apples comparisons. The seasonally-adjusted estimate for February, however, was [...]
Total factory orders in October 2016 were almost unchanged year-over-year (NSA) from those of October 2015, up just 0.5%. That was the second straight month of no growth, as factory orders in September were down just slightly, -0.1%, after being revised somewhat lower. Combining both September and October together, factory orders in those two months were 0.2% above the same [...]
When I started in this business more than twenty years ago, I fully expected to be a profession investor in the purest sense of the term. I envisioned spending my days tearing apart corporate financials, especially balance sheets, and matching them to common sense expectations of new products and imaginative advances. It was the 1990’s, after all, and everything seemed [...]
Calendar effects, base effects, and holidays continued to plague retail sales estimates. Where February 2016 included a 29th day of extra selling/buying, March finds an early Easter holiday relative to last year (it was in April). The result is difficult comparisons where the unadjusted series is not measuring underlying consumer growth but these other factors. That should change, however, in [...]
According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, layoffs in the US were up 32% in March 2016 over March 2015. Compared to both January and February this year, March was somewhat better but overall for Q1 published layoffs were also 32% more on a year-over-year basis. It wasn’t a very good quarter. Some of that is expected given the death of [...]
It is increasingly difficult to account for the estimates provided by various statistical agencies when there is no consistency not just with other non-governmental series but within each. The latest retail sales report has nothing in common with anything including itself. The mess features major revisions for the prior two months that simply leave the calendar as demarcation. Unadjusted retail [...]
There can be no doubt as to the manufacturing recession in the US, a direct reflection of US consumers. In a fitting confirmation of Chinese manufacturing, US factory orders declined for the 15th consecutive month in January 2016. The year-over-year decline was 3.3%, only slightly better than the revised 4.2% in December, but the length of this continuous decline means [...]
Anything with a positive number and the mainstream will jump. The latest was durable goods which only featured a positive number in the seasonally-adjusted series. Still, it was enough to send out the usual notices that the worst is over even for manufacturing. The U.S. manufacturing sector could be on the mend after struggling for the past year with a [...]
The January retail sales report demonstrates perfectly the nature of this whole recovery, but especially the last year or so when everything holding to the primary narrative boils down to the unemployment rate – a statistic that is more and more determined by peculiar assumptions and calculations. The advance release from the Census Bureau had enough positive vigor to provide [...]
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