Trade data headlines show the trade balance worsened from last month – and export rate of growth declined.
Analyst Opinion of Trade Data
The data in this series wobbles and the 3 month rolling averages are the best way to look at this series. The 3 month averages are declining for exports and improving for imports. The trade balance worsened.
Note that the headline numbers are not inflation adjusted.
Even though headline exports declined this month – there is little evidence of a trade war in the data.
Imports of goods were reported up – import goods growth has positive implications historically to the economy. Econintersect analysis shows unadjusted goods (not including services) growth accelerated 5.7 % month-over-month (unadjusted data) – up 12.9 % year-over-year (up 8.6 % year-over-year inflation adjusted). The rate of growth 3-month trend is accelerating (rate of change of growth is accelerating).
Exports of goods were reported down, and Econintersect analysis shows unadjusted goods exports growth acceleration of (not including services) 0.4 % month-over month – up 9.3 % year-over-year (up 5.0 % year-over-year inflation adjusted). The rate of growth 3-month trend is decelerating.
The decline in seasonally adjusted (but not inflation adjusted) exports widespread but obviously agriculture products. Import improvement was due to capital goods.
The market expected (from Nasdaq / Econoday) a trade balance of $-51.2 B to $-44.8 B (consensus $50.2 B billion deficit) and the seasonally adjusted headline deficit from US Census came in at $50.1 billion.
It should be noted that oil imports were up 6 million barrels from last month, and up 5 million barrels from one year ago.
The data in this series is noisy, and it is better to use the rolling averages to make sense of the data trends.
The headline data is seasonally but not inflation adjusted. Econintersect analysis is based on the unadjusted data, removes services (as little historical information exists to correlate the data to economic activity), and inflation adjusts. Further, there is some question whether this services portion of export/import data is valid in real time because of data gathering concerns. Backing out services from import and exports shows graphically as follows:
