The asset backed commercial paper market was one of the signature signs of the shadow banking system leading up to the Great Recession. This market mechanism for creating credit has all but evaporated. From 2004 to 2007, the amount of ABCP outstanding nearly doubled....
The percentage of small businesses that are planning to increase hiring fell back 4 percentage points to 5% in October. Unfortunately, in this recovery 10% of firms planning on increasing hiring has acted as an upper bound for this series....
Today’s employment report was…interesting. While the headline number of 204K jobs added in October was above expectations of 163K new jobs and has been widely read as welcome sign that the labor market is on the mend, the details were a little messier (to say...
One of the more striking, and under reported, trend changes in the US economy since the Great Recession has been the decline in railraod carload trafffic. The chart below shows the four-week moving average and one-year moving average total carload traffic....
The US ISM Non-Manufacturing Survey came in today slightly above consensus expectations for October (55.4 vs 54.5) The survey indicated the the non-manufacturing survey accelerated slightly in October and is growing....
Banks, and financials in general, play an important role in the performance of stock indices. Many bull markets are characterized by the outperformance of banks relative to the overall market. The latest rally in the S&P has not been confirmed by the relative outperformance of...
There doesn’t seem to be a trend in the US economic releases recently. In the past week we have had weaker housing data (Pending Home Sales), an ok production data point (Industrial Production), below consensus employment report (ADP), a weaker regional survey (Dallas Fed), and...
The Treasury Department reported that in September the government had a surplus of approximately $75 billion. The budget deficit as a percent of GDP has basically halved since the end of 2011....
Two of the largest expenses for consumers are housing and gasoline. The gain in house prices suggest that the owner’s equivalent rent portion of CPI will rise in the coming months. Meanwhile, retail gasoline prices suggests that the gasoline component of CPI will fall....
The overall consumer confidence index fell from 80.2 to 71.2 in October due mainly to the government shutdown this past month. The consumer confidence survey also takes the temperature of consumers in different income brackets. What caught our eye was the difference in confidence between...
Getting timely data on house prices is tricky. The Case-Shiller Home Price Index tracks 20 cities but with a two month time lag. The latest data (August) shows a couple of interesting points emerging about the national housing market....
The Pending Home Sales Index has been running quite a bit hotter than the Existing Home Sales Index since late 2011. This month’s report cooled that trend somewhat. The Pending Home Sales Index surprised on the downside in September. The consensus expectation was for no...
The level of job openings has now been been basically unchanged since February. The job openings data may be signalling a stalling out of employment. Initial jobless claims fell by 12k but the prior week was revised up by 4k....
Peaks in NYSE Margin Debt has been a leading indicator in the last large market declines (2000, 2007, 2011). NYSE Margin Debt was looking like it might be topping out in April. However, the latest data for September shows it increased by about $20 billion...
US import prices ex-petroleum fell further on a year-over-year basis. This series has now been negative since March. The movements in the USD do not suggest this deflationary pulse from import prices will be abating over the next few months....
