If you had known in October all that would transpire over the next 2 ½ months, how would you have positioned your portfolio? The conventional wisdom before the election was that a Biden win would be negative for stocks because he has promised to raise taxes and specifically corporate taxes. In 2016, conventional wisdom was that a Trump victory would [...]
There is simply no way to spin these figures as anything good. Not just the usual ones were talk about here, but more so some new data that you probably haven’t seen before. Beginning with the regular, it doesn’t matter that the level of initial jobless claims has declined substantially over the past few weeks. The fact of the matter [...]
Private US businesses are not building new facilities, or renovating old ones, at a rate that suggests the economy is doing well. Let alone booming. For more than two years now, the aggregate level of Private Non-residential Construction Spending has been flat. According to the Census Bureau in figures released today, construction capex in July 2018 (seasonally adjusted) was less [...]
After being rumored and talked about for over a year, at the end of last year the tax cuts were finally delivered. The idea had captured much market attention during that often anxious period of political flirtation. Prices would rise or fall by turn based on whether or not it seemed a realistic possibility. Public Law #115-97 or An Act [...]
The Treasury market isn’t the only place where the idea of “globally synchronized growth” is proving a tough sell. The collapse of the yield curve suggests, in fact, it isn’t being bought one bit. Apart from bonds, US companies aren’t warming to the economic warming, either. The labor market apart from the unemployment rate remains suspiciously subdued. According to the [...]
Ronald Coase was one of the few economists who was easy to admire. There are and have been a few out there, and it was Coase by and large leading the critique of the increasingly detached state of economics (really Economics). In his 1991 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he was as usual blunt in his admonishments, saying, “I have made [...]
Construction spending rose slightly in August after two months of serious declines. At a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of $1.22 trillion, that’s slightly less than the estimate for November 2016 when “reflation” (sentiment) was at its apex. It’s a pattern that we see repeated throughout the economic accounts; some growth in the second half of last year but then instead of [...]
Of all the high frequency data the Personal Savings Rate is probably the least reliable. It is subject to both regular and benchmark revisions that can change the estimates drastically one way or the other. One step up from that statistic is the figures for Construction Spending. The initial monthly estimates don’t survive very long, and lately they have been [...]
Total construction spending fell considerably in June 2017, according to Census Bureau estimates released yesterday. Seasonally-adjusted, layouts for new construction declined by 1.3% from May. That’s the second time in the last three months there was such a large drop. Year-over-year (unadjusted), total spending grew by just 1.2%, the lowest rate of expansion since November 2011 (subject to revisions, which [...]
With the preliminary release of the quarterly GDP revision comes the BEA’s version of corporate profits. This is obviously different from EPS accounting that goes along with stock indices and various earnings growth measures as this macro view of profits encompasses a much larger business spectrum (though it does not include non-corporate business which is a pass-through component into personal [...]
Stay In Touch