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Market Talk – Wednesday, November 15
Asian markets opened lower with markets continuing the slide as the day progressed. The Nikkei took the trophy for being the weakest component with a daily loss of 1.6%. With declining energy and commodity prices coupled with poor economic data was enough to take the market lower and the immediate effect was a strengthening of […]
Market Arithmetic And Balance Sheet Worries: Earnings Vs Interest Payments
Junk bonds have been underperforming lately as widely noted. Albert Edwards at Society General also notes the underperformance of companies with poor balance sheet fundamentals. Edwards Comments “With bullishness sentiment at extremes, is it significant that my colleague Andrew Lapthorne noted in his widely read “Global Market Arithmetic” that despite the overall equity market continuing […]
Total Household Debt Increases, Delinquency Rates Of Several Debt Types Continue Rising
from the New York Fed The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Center for Microeconomic Data today issued its Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, which reported that total household debt increased by $116 billion (0.9%) to $12.96 trillion in the third quarter of 2017. There were increases in mortgage, student, auto and credit card […]
Strong Q3 Earnings Push Insurance ETFs Higher
The insurance industry has performed well this reporting cycle with robust earnings from key players. Even damages from successive hurricanes Harvey and Irma have not taken the sheen away from the industry as predicted earlier. Prominent players such as MetLife (MET – Free Report) , Prudential Financial (PRU – Free Report) , Chubb Corp (CB – Free Report) , Allstate (ALL – Free […]
Consumer Price Index: October Headline At 2.0%
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the October Consumer Price Index data this morning. The year-over-year non-seasonally adjusted Headline CPI came in at 2.04%, down from 2.23% the previous month. Year-over-year Core CPI (ex Food and Energy) came in at 1.77%, up fractionally from the previous month’s 1.69%. Here is the introduction from the BLS […]
Junk Bond Weakness Limited To Healthcare & Telecommunications
Relative Valuations We’ve seen a coordinated stock market rally in about every index globally. The chart below compares the recent Shiller PEs of the American, Japanese, European, and Emerging stock markets. The dotted lines are the average since the start of this bull market in 2009. As you can see, America, Japan, and Europe are […]
Bitcoin Price Soars To $13,000 In Desperate Zimbabwe
We noted in June that Zimbabwe’s cash crisis continued unabated. Those awaiting cash transfers at a bank may wait a month to be cleared and, even then, the transfer may be refused. The Standard, Zimbabwe’s leading Sunday newspaper, ran an article at the time entitled, “Black market thrives, as banks run dry.” Some highlights from that article: HARARE’S […]
Inflation Rising From The Ashes
It might not be much of a rise but inflation clearly picked up for the month of October at the producer level. It rose a strong .4% matching last month’s when expectations were for a much smaller number of .1%. Stripping out food and energy it still rose .2%. These numbers pushed inflation to 2.8% […]
The Big Four Economic Indicators: October Real Retail Sales
Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close as they get to identifying their method. There is, however, a general belief that there are four big indicators that the committee weighs […]
E Disconcerting News On The Wage Front
Today’s release of U.S. data on wages growth for October should give the Federal Reserve members some pause for concern when they meet in December. In nominal (current dollars) terms, wages have moved up a modest 2.4 % over the past 12 months. Economists prefer to measure wage performance in real terms— discounted for the […]
