by WARREN MOSLER Starting to look more like most of the rest of the world: US retail trade fell by 1.2 percent from a month earlier in December 2018, following a revised 0.1 percent growth in November and missing market …
Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter Consumer exuberance maxed out last summer and has since changed direction. The headlines today were all about retail sales that “fell most since 2009,” or as the WSJ put it, “at Fastest Pace since 2009,” or …
https://twitter.com/OccupyWisdom/status/1096118006600683520 https://twitter.com/OccupyWisdom/status/1096114969417039873 Retail sales tumbling, as outlined in last fall's client warning of "Cooling Consumer Spending." See public comments from Jan: https://t.co/47RYgw4sg4 pic.twitter.com/iVjf88aSYo — Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) (@businesscycle) February 14, 2019 the "greatest economy ever" just hit a …
Retail sales drop the most since September 2009 U.S. retail sales recorded their biggest drop in more than nine years in December as receipts fell across the board, suggesting a sharp slowdown in economic activity at the end of 2018. …
by WARREN MOSLER Trumped up expectations fading: Highlights Doubts about future economic growth diminished optimism among small business owners to the lowest level in 26 months, according to the NFIB’s Small Business Optimism Index, which fell 3.2 points in January to 101.2, below …
by WARREN MOSLER The ‘labor market’ is not a ‘fair game’ as people need to work to eat, and business only needs to hire if it likes the return prospects, so real wages should be expected to remain depressed without …
Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter Americans love paying big profit margins for big equipment, and automakers love them for it, but total sales are declining, and something doesn’t add up. The average transaction price of the vehicles sold by Fiat Chrysler …
This is becoming a very big but undisclosed problem. Let’s just pretend that real estate is still affordable and there’s no fraud going on and that the massive debt load everyone has isn’t an issue. Sounds good, right?
This article was originally published at Zero Hedge Forget about the automobile industry turning over a new leaf for the new year: the beginning of 2019 has started just as miserably as 2018 ended for many major auto OEMs in the …
Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter “It’s been dripping down, down, down. Frustrating that the housing market is not recovering”: National Association of Realtors What will home sales look like in January and February? Very, very lousy, according to pending home sales, …
by WARREN MOSLER Apple says China sales fell 27% last quarter (Nikkei) Apple’s net sales in greater China, including the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, fell 27% on the year to $13.17 billion for the three months ended Dec. 29 …
Look at this chart: ratio of “present situation” to “expectations” from the Conference Board confidence report. Cut-and-dry sign of a tapped-out consumer. A great leading indicator at turning points because it either coincides with the recession or occurs a few …
by Michael Snyder Apple iPhone sales are never supposed to go down. For nearly two decades, Apple has been an unbeatable economic miracle, but now it appears that times have changed. Global sales for the iPhone were disastrous during the holiday …
by Mac Slavo of SHTFplan The unusually large drop in home sales is puzzling those who work directly in the industry. Real estate agents are confused and baffled by the sudden and seemingly unexpected lack of home sales. Sales of homes plunged in …
by WARREN MOSLER Bad: Highlights Mortgage rates began to move down in December but it wasn’t soon enough to help the month’s resales. Existing home sales fell a sharper-than-expected 6.4 percent to a 4.990 million annualized rate that is the …
by Michael Snyder It appears to be more likely than ever that the U.S. economy is heading for a recession. On Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 301 points as investors were rattled by several very important pieces …
Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter But these are still the good times. Don’t blame the December debacle on the partial government shutdown – it “has not had a significant effect on December closings,” the National Association of Realtors explained in its report this …
Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter But first-time buyers cling to hope. Sales of newly built detached houses in Australia plunged 6.7% in December 2018 from November, to just 4,622 houses, according to the Housing Industry Association (HIA), easily whizzing by the …
by Martin Armstrong Gun sales in Germany have soared because of what they call the “Rapeugees.” Three years ago, more than 2,000 German girls were raped/sexually assaulted on New Year’s Eve in several German cities. Then a leaked document surfaced reporting …
Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter Welcome to the Big Club of Saturation & Decline. For the month of December, light new-vehicle sales in China plunged 13%, compared to a year ago, to 2.23 million vehicles, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers …
Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter This is on purpose. Macy’s is not alone. Other department stores and brick-and-mortar retailers are into this too, at least the ones that haven’t filed for bankruptcy yet. So we’ll take a look (11 minutes):
Newly built home sales fall in California from CNBC. via CNBC: The government shutdown hasn’t completely stopped the flow of stunningly bad housing data. Sales of newly built homes fell 18 percent in December compared with December of 2017, according …
via Bloomberg: hat just happened? I last wrote one of these newsletters on Dec. 20, the day after the last Federal Reserve monetary meeting. (More on my disappearance later in this commentary.) Since that date, stocks have staged a spectacular decline worldwide, …
by Irina Slav Tesla will stop offering the lowest-priced versions of its Models S and X, chief executive Elon Musk wrote in a tweet. “Starting on Monday, Tesla will no longer be taking orders for the 75 kWh version of the …
So, all that hype about christmas sales was, well, HYPE?!!! Who could have guessed pic.twitter.com/WPJwFkazGN — mcm-ct.com (@mcm_ct) January 10, 2019 Retail is puking all over itself, again pic.twitter.com/VF337CS52R — Alastair (@StockBoardAsset) January 10, 2019 Why are retailers getting crushed? …
Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter This is getting serious. Sales of new passenger vehicles, as measured by registrations, dropped 5.5% in December from a year earlier in the UK, the second largest auto market in the EU, behind Germany. Sales in …
Authored by Steve Stretsky via VanCityCondoGuide.com, The correction in the Vancouver condo market is now fully underway after prices peaked at the beginning of 2018. This should really not come as a surprise given how weak the detached housing market …
Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter But average transaction prices rise to record highs. In terms of new-vehicle sales in the US, 2018 was the third relentless down-year in a row for three of the four biggest automakers, GM, Ford, and Toyota. …
by WARREN MOSLER Agent Orange, the self proclaimed tariff man, taking the EU: US decelerating: I would have expected Chile to be affected most by global warming… It’s becoming more clear to me that lending shifted from banks to other …
by WARREN MOSLER Corporate Profit Crunch Looms as Stocks Slide (WSJ) In December, analysts cut their earnings forecasts for 2019 on more than half the companies in the S&P 500, according to FactSet, the first time that had happened in …