Chinese Goods - President Trump Threatens To Tariff $200 Billion Worth
Chinese Goods - Latest Tariff News President Trump told his aides to go ahead with the tariff on $200 billion worth of goods. Let’s be clear, these are tariffs on $200 billion worth of goods, not $200 billion in tariffs like the news media sometimes reports in an effort to either be succinct or make…
Apple Tech Leads Sector & Overall Market Higher
Apple Tech - Stocks Rally Again On Thursday Apple Tech - It's wrong to suggest the correction isn’t almost over as the market has been up every day this week, following a week where it was down every day. The S&P 500 is less than 10 points away from its all time closing high. It’s…
Producer Price Inflation - Very Benign
Producer Price Inflation - PPI Final Demand Producer Price Inflation - The breakeven inflation rate and treasury yields have increased every year over year since hourly earnings growth hit a cycle high. The August PPI report missed expectations widely, signaling inflation isn’t a threat at all. As you can see in the chart below, month over…
China Trade Negotiations | Apple Releases New iPhones
China Trade Negotiations - America Tries To Diffuse The Trade Skirmish With China As I mentioned, America is trying to end the trade dispute with China. There was a report from the Wall Street Journal that America is trying to arrange talks with China before President Trump follows through with the tariff on $200 billion…
Record High Small Business Sentiment
Small Business - Record High Optimism The NFIB small business optimism index was up from 107.9 in July to 108.8 in August. It beat the consensus for 108.1 and the high end of the range which was 108.5. This was the highest reading in the 45 year history of the report. You can see in…
Hurricane Florence Takes Aim On North Carolina: Insurers Could Lose $20 Billion
Hurricane Florence To Impact The Economy Hurricane Florence - The biggest news on Tuesday was the potential for hurricane Florence to deliver catastrophic damage to North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia later this week. All those states along with Maryland and Washington D.C. are under states of emergency. You can see the graphic below shows…
Used Vehicle Prices Up 6.4% Year Over Year
Used Vehicle Prices Up Used vehicle prices can be used to measure the strength of the economy. As you can see from the chart below, the Manheim used vehicle index cratered in late 2008 and was stable from late 2011 to early 2017. The results in the past few quarters have been great. In August,…
Earnings Revisions Fall While Stocks Rally - Worst Case Scenario
Earnings Revisions - Estimates Weaken Earnings Revisions - Just because earnings season is over doesn’t mean earnings estimates don’t matter. Since investors are always projecting future cashflows, estimates always matter. They aren’t set in stone. The rate of change of estimates gives us an idea of where the economy is going and where stocks should…
Wage Growth - Solid In August
Wage Growth - Is It Accelerating? Wage Growth - In my last post I gave an overview of the August labor report. I’ll fill in the details with this article. ECRI has been negative on economic growth since late 2017. There was some slowness in Q1, but that was reversed in Q2 as growth was…
2 Year Yield Hits 2.7% For The First Time This Cycle
2 Year Yield - Treasury Yields Soar In the 2 Year Yield, The treasury market reacted to the jobs report which I will review later in this article. The 10 year yield increased 7 basis points to 2.94%. The 2 year yield increased 7 basis points to 2.7% which is the highest yield this cycle. The…