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petroleum

Wholesalers Cautious On Inventory For Good Reason

By |2016-08-09T15:58:42-04:00August 9th, 2016|Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Wholesale sales for June 2016 declined slightly, -0.6%, year-over-year. Since February, sales have flattened out in unadjusted terms. Seasonally-adjusted, wholesales sales rose nearly 2% from May 2016, and are up $17 billion from February. Of that increase, however, $11.5 billion was petroleum alone. Taking out the volatile swings in oil and oil prices, wholesale sales ex petroleum have been stagnant [...]

US IP Down For 10th Straight Month Indicating Growth Is Now The Outlier Scenario

By |2016-07-15T16:08:13-04:00July 15th, 2016|Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Industrial production in the United States remains caught up in the latest downward shift of the 2012 slowdown. The Federal Reserve estimates that overall industrial production contracted for the 10th straight month, falling 0.7% in June 2016. The degree of decline is relatively small, but as with so many other accounts the lingering of the condition for an only increasing [...]

Inventory Finally Catching Sales But Not Close To Balance

By |2016-05-10T15:51:50-04:00May 10th, 2016|Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Wholesale sales rose just 0.8% in March, following a similar rise in February. For the quarter, sales dropped almost 2% from Q1 2015. More importantly, inventory barely budged in either March or for the quarter. Rising just 0.2% in the latest month, that was the smallest yearly gain since June 2010. In Q1 overall, wholesale inventories were also practically unchanged [...]

The Inventory Deepens

By |2016-03-15T12:53:39-04:00March 15th, 2016|Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Unlike retail sales in January, wholesale sales won’t need revisions to become highly negative in either the seasonal or unadjusted versions. On a seasonally-adjusted basis, wholesale sales declined rather sharply in January (-1.35% M/M), the fourth consecutive decline, sixth out of the past seven months and making fourteen of the past eighteen since all this began. On an unadjusted basis, [...]

Amazingly, Still No Wholesale Improvement

By |2015-11-10T17:31:17-05:00November 10th, 2015|Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

The release of wholesale sales for September showed very little change in the stretching condition of sales against inventory. Overall, sales declined year-over-year for the ninth consecutive month and ten out of the last eleven. At -3.6% in October, that compares to yet another gain in inventory, this time +4.5%. That leaves the 6-month average for inventory at +4.6% which [...]

Far Beyond Oil; Wholesale Imbalance Extends to Extremes In Autos

By |2015-10-09T13:36:56-04:00October 9th, 2015|Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

What is taking place on the wholesale level of the supply chain is simply unprecedented. Admittedly, the current iteration of the wholesale data series only dates back to 1992, so there is some possibility of a similar disparity at some point in actual economic history. However, at present, inventory continues onward with only a slight deviation and slowing recently while [...]

Wholesale Lingering

By |2015-09-10T13:20:11-04:00September 10th, 2015|Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

After nearly coming in flat for June, wholesale sales fell almost 5% year-over-year in July. That is the second worst month of this “cycle”, bested only by May’s nearly 7% drop. The six-month average is now -3.2% which is uncomfortably close to the worst part of the dot-com recession which only averaged -4.0% at the low. Despite that sales environment, [...]

Wholesale Gap Actually Grows

By |2015-08-11T13:45:20-04:00August 11th, 2015|Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Petroleum sales at the wholesale level grew to a year-to-date high in June. According to the Commerce Dept.’s latest estimates, crude oil sales jumped to $48.6 billion, seasonally-adjusted, from a low in January of just $41.9 billion. Though that seems like good news for a wholesale sector under tremendous inventory pressure, it means that absent that oil price effect wholesale [...]

Another Strongly Negative January Signal

By |2015-03-10T14:42:08-04:00March 10th, 2015|Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

The estimates for wholesale sales and inventory complete the devastation of January’s economic landscape. Overall sales fell by the largest amount, nearly 4%, since the bottom of the Great Recession. Inventories, however, continue to build despite the slowing sales, leaving the inventory-to-sales ratio far above either the most recent “cycle” peak or even the last one. The greatest part of [...]

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