Mid Term
May 16, 2023 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Morning Briefing, Short Term |
The typical pattern is for households to run up credit card balances for holiday shopping and then for consumers to pay down credit card balances in the first quarter. That’s what happens in a healthy economy where consumers are living within their means and aren’t seeing family budgets stretched by high inflation. But that isn’t what happened in the first quarter of 2023. For the first time in 20 years, consumers added to their debt loads in the first quarter rather than paying down some of their fourth-quarter spending.
May 15, 2023 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Videos |
This week’s Trend of the Week is Credit Squeeze. SLOOS (Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey), a Fed survey, asks bank lending officers what they’re seeing in the credit market for commercial industrial loans. In the most recent survey, 46% of these officers report that their banks are making it harder to get loans. This is a textbook example of Hyman Minsky’s credit cycle. After a period of booming lending, the credit cycle returns to a period of tightening credit, often coinciding with eye-opening events like the Silicon Valley Bank failure, and a slowing down of the economy overall. The SLOOS report also showed a 56% drop in demand for commercial loans in the first quarter–an indicator that companies are aware that loans are harder to come by. Companies are having real trouble raising capital which is resulting in merger and/or acquisition deals for early-stage companies and employee layoffs as CEOs and CFOs attempt to hoard cash. The signs are that the Fed is taking notice of this contraction in the credit market and is starting to factor it into rate hike decisions. The Fed may decide it doesn’t need as many interest rate increases as it originally thought if the supply of credit is shrinking quiickly.
May 12, 2023 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Morning Briefing |
It’s only a survey of consumer sentiment so it’s not very important to the financial markets, right? Wrong. The University of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment for May illustrates perfectly the trap that the Federal Reserve is caught in right now.
May 4, 2023 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
When is a 4.5% year-over-year drop in earnings for the stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500 good news? When the forecast for first-quarter earnings projected a 6.8% drop. Bloomberg now projects, with 74% of the companies in the S&P 500 reporting first-quarter results, that earnings for the stocks in the index will be down 4.5% year over year this quarter.
May 2, 2023 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, MMM, Videos |
This week’s Trend of the Week is The Pain is Spreading. By pain, I mean layoffs. It started with technology companies as we saw job cuts from companies like Meta Platforms, Amazon, and Alphabet. Then recently announced cuts of 7,000 employees. Now, layoffs are spreading to other areas of the market. 3M (NYSE: MMM), a generally reliable blue chip stock, announced they’d be cutting 2,500 jobs back in January and have now added 6,000 more jobs to the chopping block- about 10% of their total workforce. This is in reaction to slowing sales and the potential for losses from liability lawsuits. In the most recent quarter, organic sales were down 4.9% (better than the expected 6.9%) with a guidance of a 2% sales decline for 2023. While 3M is trying to cut costs with layoffs, Wall Street remains skeptical. 3M hasn’t seen the rally other blue chip stocks have seen recently. The company has so many products out there, it is representative of the market as a whole. And this one example plays into the bigger picture of the slowing economy, greater job losses, and, possibly, a recession.
April 24, 2023 | Daily JAM, DIS, Mid Term |
Layoffs aren’t just for technology companies right now. Disney (DIS) has begun the second round of a projected three rounds of job cuts that will add up to a total reduction of 7,000 employees this year.
April 18, 2023 | COST, Daily JAM, GDX, GLD, GOLD, KO, Mid Term, PEP, RWM, Special Reports |
10 Picks for the Coming Recession. This one is especially difficult. Not only do I face the usual crystal-ball problem that comes up whenever you try to pick an investment for the future–what’s the macro and micro world going to look like in 6 months or a year from now–but I’ve got two big Recession-specific challenges. First, is there actually going to be a Recession in 2023? All the signs, in my opinion, point toward a recession in the second and third quarters, but it’s by no means guaranteed that we’ll have the two quarters of negative GDP growth that’s required by the minimal definition of a recession. And what’s the point, you might well ask, of making picks for a coming recession that never arrives? And, second, how bad will this recession be?
April 18, 2023 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
China’s economy grew at a faster-than-expected pace in the first quarter. Gross domestic product grew 4.5% year-on-year in the first three months of the year, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed on Tuesday, faster than the 2.9% in the previous quarter. It beat analyst forecasts for a 4.0% expansion and marked the strongest growth in a year. But investors in Asian financial markets reacted with disappointment
April 18, 2023 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Morning Briefing |
The exact date that the federal government could run out of accounting gimmicks and actually default on the national debt is open to debate. Could be June or July or as late as December or even sometime in 2024. The estimates are all over the block. Which is one reason that the stock market isn’t pricing in this potential event. The timing largely depends on the pace of tax payments. The more the government collects and the sooner, the farther away a default would be. Now with income tax day upon us, Yahoo Finance is reporting two new studies that say a default is on the schedule for earlier than expected.
April 10, 2023 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
U.S. households project that inflation a year from now would stand at 4.7%, versus February’s 4.2%, according to the most recent survey from the New York Federal Reserve Bank. This was the first increase in year-ahead expected inflation since October.
April 10, 2023 | AAPL, Daily JAM, Jubak Picks, Mid Term, Morning Briefing, Top 50 Stocks |
Shipments by all PC makers slumped 29% in the first quarter to a level below that in early 2019, according to tech market analysts at IDC. Lenovo Group and Dell Technologies registered drops of more than 30%, while HP (HPQ) was down 24.2%. No major brand was spared from the slowdown, with Asustek Computer Inc. rounding out the top 5 with a 30.3% fall. But Apple (AAPL)let the plunge with personal computer shipments down by 40.5% in the first quarter.
April 6, 2023 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Videos |
Today’s topic is The Problem With Goldilocks. This Goldilocks market is dependent on three things: there will be no recession, interest rates will stabilize after one more May hike from the Fed, and we’ll get falling inflation. These three factors are necessary for the porridge to be not too hot and not too cold. The problem? I don’t see how these three factors exist simultaneously. Falling inflation but no recession? I don’t see how we get to lower inflation without something at least close to a recession. I think we need a recession in order for the Fed to stop rate hikes. Oil isn’t helping the situation as OPEC+ voted to cut oil production for a year, and energy-reliant stocks are already showing the effects. Energy prices don’t immediately factor into the Fed’s decision-making, since the Fed focuses on core inflation, which excludes oil and food, but eventually, oil prices affect the market as a whole. Goldilocks may not be in immediate danger of being eaten by the bear, but I wouldn’t sell her an insurance policy.
