China’s consumer price index rose 0.1% in December from a year earlier, in line with the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Factory deflation extended into a 27th month, though the producer price index recorded a slower drop of 2.3%, the National Bureau of Statistics said Thursday. For the full year, consumer prices only inched up 0.2% from 2023, well short of the 1.1% gain economists had predicted at the beginning of 2024.
The Institute for Supply Management’s index of services advanced 2 points to 54.1 last month. That show of strength in the economy–readings above 50 indicate expansion–was enough to push stocks lower as the markets began to price in a delay in the next interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve until July The measure of prices paid for materials and services rose more than 6 points to 64.4, suggesting that the drop in the inflation rate in the service sector–about 70% of the U.S. economy–might be over.
China’s retail sales growth unexpectedly weakened in November. Retail sales rose 3% from a year ago. That was the the slowest annual growth rate in three months and it was well below even the most bearish forecast.
Just last week Chinese policymakers elevated boosting consumption to the top priority for next year. That marked , only the second time in a decade that the consumer economy was the focus of official policy.
If you’re an investor looking for income, you’re facing what I’d call a Yield Drought. And this is no temporary dry spell. Things on the income investing front look they’ll get worse before they get better. Unless a financial crisis intervenes in 2025 to make everything else much worse and the yield story much better. Because, you see, there are two parts to the current Yield Drought.
I expect more breathless speculation on who will fill the most important posts in the Trump Administration that will be sworn in on January 20, 2025. The consensus, which I agree with, is that this administration will be much different than the first Trump team with fewer figures with anything approaching old-style conservative Republican credentials. Thinkoif the contrast between second Trump administration vice-president J.D. Vance and first administration pick Mike Pence. That difference has made any meaningful handicapping of this race for power extremely difficult–even though the issue of who will fill what chair is incredibly important. For investors I think the most important pick to watch is Treasury Secretary.
I continue to see this rally continuing through the fourth quarter of 2024vbefore faltering in the first quarter of 2025. That call does assume that we’ll get through today’s election and its aftermath with relatively little actual violence–protests in the streets from the losing side and lots of court cases, but no mass armed violence. And it assumes that projected earnings growth in the fourth quarter will live up to expectations and show the highest growth rate in all of 2024. No one knows what this post-election period will bring. So let’s move onto assumption #2: How likely is it that fourth quarter growth will hold up?
Yields rose and bond prices dropped again today as weak demand in a pair of Treasury note auctions suggested investors are anxious about supply on the eve of the next financing quarter. For the day, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury rose 4 basis points to a yield of 4.28%. The yield on the 10-year Treasury is now up 53 basis points in the last month.
I don’t know which candidate will win the election. Right now the polls are within the margin of error on the national level–and even tighter in the seven battleground states that will likely decide the electionm. But I do know the results on November 5 will move stocks. Some right off the bat even before the results are certified. Ans more significantly as a new administration clarifies its policy views and takes office.The results will move the stock market in general
And they will move individual stocks and sectors in particular.
The U.S. economy grew at a stronger pace in the second quarter than initially reported. Gross domestic product, GDP, rose at a 3% annualized rate during the April-June quarter, up from the previous estimate of 2.8%, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Thursday, August 29.
Remember the good old days–say, 2023–when all you had to do was slap AI in the name of a company and the stock would soar? I kept waiting for AI Burgers made from AI cows, or AI Shoes, which used AI machine learning algorithms to tell you what size shoe you needed. This investor embrace of all things AI led to the fear that there was an AI-stock market bubble that would send the entire stock market into a very painful bear market when it broke. The appetite for AI stocks is still huge–witness the rebound in Nvidia (NVDA) shares that added $400 billion to the stock’s market cap in a four-day recovery from the “sky-is-falling, we’re-headed-to-a-recession stock market retreat. But this stock market still has a big AI problem. We will find out how big when Nvidia reports earnings after the close tomorrow, August 28. Here’s the problem: Most AI companies aren’t making money.
Gold hit a new all-time high today of $2554 an ounce on the Comex for December delivery. Gold’s 20% or so gain in 2024 to date (as of August 26) is a result of strong central-bank buying plus Asian purchases plus anticipation that the Federal Reserve was about to cut interest rates. Now that Fed chair Jerome Powell has just about promised a cut at the Fed’s September 18 meeting it looks like gold will climb further in 2024 on the fundamentals. Bullish Wall Street targets say $2700 to $3,000 by the end of 2024. That’s a decent reason to hold gold. But the very scary geopolitical landscape over the next six months makes me anxious to add more gold even at the record nominal high for the metal.
No doubt about it. A soft-landing would way better for the economy than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. No big spike in unemployment. Decent growth in real personal incomes. Controlled and relatively low inflation. Real interest rates falling–slowly–from their current historically high levels. It would be a huge positive achievement if the Federal Reserve could engineer a soft landing after raising interest rates to slow the economy and cut inflation and then beginning to reduce interest rates to make sure that growth didn’t slow too much or too quickly. A huge positive the economy. I’m not sure, however, that an economic soft landing is quite so big a positive for the stock market.
