Weak Retail Sales Growth Defies Estimates
Weak Retail Sales November retail sales report was weak. This goes against the strong consumer sentiment index and the solid real wage growth. It also goes atainst the Gallup poll that asked how much consumers would spend. Finally, it contradicts Costco’s great same store sales growth, and the low unemployment rate. Personally, I think this…
Stocks Rally As Phase 1 Of The Trade Deal Is Nearly Final
New Record High On Trade Deal Hopes If you thought that there probably wasn’t going to be a trade deal by December 15th, you were wrong. A common theme with these trade negotiations is that a couple weeks before deadlines, it looks like there is no shot of a deal being done. Then a couple…
Low Inflation & No Chance Of A Deep Recession
Low Core Inflation Again Core inflation would need to rise significantly and stay there for the Fed to raise rates. That likely won’t happen. November CPI report showed more of the same as core inflation hardly moved. Core CPI stayed at 2.3%, while headline CPI increased from 1.8% to 2.1% because of energy inflation. This…
Stocks Rally After Powell’s Dovish Presser
Stocks Increase Slightly After the Fed didn’t change rates at its December meeting and Powell stated he wouldn’t hike rates in 2020 unless inflation spiked, stocks increased modestly on Wednesday. After Powell’s first few meetings led to declines in the S&P 500, the past 3 have all led to rallies. That’s because the Fed hiked…
Fed Doesn’t Change Rates & Might Not In 2020 Either
Review Of The “Unimportant” Fed Meeting This wasn’t a hotly anticipated Fed meeting because the Fed wasn’t expected to hike or cut rates, the decision was widely priced in, and the Fed shouldn’t act at the next meeting either. There was very little uncertainty about the January meeting as well (few expect a change then). …
Best Labor Market Since At Least 1958
Another Slight Decline For Stocks Investors have one thing on their mind and it’s not the Fed meeting on Wednesday where there will be no change in rates. Every day that goes by without hard evidence that there will be a trade deal means we are one step closer to tariffs being raised on the…
Upper Income Households Have The 3rd Most Confidence In 20 Years
December Redbook Shows Continued Strength We’ve already had a strong Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but that’s not the entire holiday shopping season. The rest of December is also important. Last year, we saw a huge dip in retail sales growth in December. There was an extra week for shopping. But consumers didn’t utilize that…
S&P 500 To Rally4.3% in 2020
Slight Pullback On Monday The stock market fell modestly on Monday after its big rally on Friday which was caused by the great jobs report. And, the market was pushed lower by Apple’s 1.4% decline. S&P 500 fell 0.32%. Apple is one of the trade sensitive stocks. Obviously, there are other news events that can…
Great Real WageGrowth In Full Labor Market
Education And Healthcare Drive Job Creation November jobs report showed 266,000 jobs created which was the most since January. 41,000 of the manufacturing jobs created were related to the ending of the GM strike. That means there really were 13,000 manufacturing jobs created which isn’t terrible. ISM manufacturing employment index fell 1.1 to 46.6 and…
Stocks Explode On Strong Jobs Report
Big Rally In Stocks After Strong Jobs Report Many investors thought the November jobs report would show less jobs created than it did. And many also thought a very strong jobs report with high wage growth could be problematic for the stock market. I will review the headline numbers from this labor report later in…