Morning Briefing
June 28, 2022 | COP, CORN, Daily JAM, EQNR, Jubak Picks, Morning Briefing, UNG, Volatility |
The Conference Board’s latest reading on consumer confidence showed consumer expectations in June fell to their lowest level since 2013. The consumer confidence index for June fell to 98.7 from 103.2 in May, below expectations for a reading of 100. The report’s expectations index, which is based on consumers’ short-term outlook for income growth, the job market, and overall business conditions, fell to 66.4, its lowest reading since March 2013.
June 27, 2022 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Short Term |
I see 2 big volatility events ahead of us in July that are powerful enough to move stocks. Get on the right side of these and there’s money to be made. Here’s how I handicap these two events.
June 24, 2022 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Special Reports |
And there I thought the hard part was laying out my thoughts on the trends in the market over the next five years. Turns out that outlining investment specifics is even harder. So this is just the first 12 months of picks and positioning for the next five years.
June 22, 2022 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Videos |
My one-hundred-and-forty-eighth YouTube video “Ouch! The Fed Gets Honest About Inflation” went up today. In front of the Senate Finance Committee today, Fed chair Jerome Powell said that the Fed has all the tools it needs to fight inflation–except, he admitted, that nothing it does to raise interest rates will lower the price of gasoline or food. Those prices don’t figure into the core inflation rate the Fed watches, but they are very real to consumers. More money spent on food and fuel means less money available for everything else.
June 21, 2022 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
A deeply troubling look at consumer balances from Statista. Well, deeply troubling if you hope that the United States will avoid a recession. (Frankly, I’m in the “Hope we avoid but I’m afraid we won’t camp.”) In April, Americans saved just 4.4% of disposable personal income, according to data from the U.S Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s down from 12.6% in April 2021 and it’s the lowest rate since September 2008, when the country was in the middle of the Great Recession.
June 16, 2022 | Daily JAM, Jubak Picks, Morning Briefing, Volatility |
Yesterday, the stock market was up with the Standard & Poor’s 500 gaining 1.46% on the day and the NASDAQ Composite up 2.49%. Listening to the Federal Reserve’s policy statement after the June 15 meeting of its Open Market Committee, Wall Street chose to hear a promise of interest rate cuts as early as the end of 2023 and certainly in 2023. Aggressive interest rate increases in 2022, from this perspective, are just a necessary precondition to those interest rate cuts. Today, the stock market is down with the Standard & Poor’s 500 falling 3.25% and the NASDAQ Composite off 4.08% at the close. The narrative on investors’ and traders’ minds today is the rising odds of a recession–75% odds in favor by 2024 a Bloomberg survey of economists says with 25% odds of a recession in 2023. For a day that trumps the hopes for 2024 interest rate cuts (which would, after all, only materialize if the economy has, indeed, tumbled into recession. I expect this “War of the Two Narratives” to continue for a while
June 15, 2022 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, You Might Have Missed |
The projections released by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday, June 15–the so-called Dot Plot–show a central bank that sees a tough 2022, especially on interest rates and inflation, but a definite improvement in 2024. This fits with the developing Wall Street narrative that sees inflation dropping in 2023 and 2024 and the Fed looking to cut interest rates in 2024.
June 15, 2022 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Videos |
My one-hundred-and-forty-fifth YouTube video “Fed Hike Makes the Market Happy” went up today. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 75 basis points today–instead of the 50 points so widely expected just weeks ago–and stocks rallied. Here’s the Wall Street narrative that explains why.
June 13, 2022 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
The latest Consumer Expectations survey (that is for May) from the New York Federal Reserve shows U.S. households’ anticipate inflation will rise at a 6.6% annual rate over the next year. That’s up from April expectations for a 6.3% rate. The May anticipated rate matches March results in the survey for the highest inflation anticipation on record.
June 10, 2022 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
Headline Consumer Price Index inflation in May rose to a new annual high rate of 8.6% in May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today, June 10. Headline prices rose 1% from April. The big drivers were, as expected, food (with prices up at a 10.1% annual rate) and energy. The core CPI, which strips out food and energy prices, rose 0.6% in May from April and at a 6% annual rate.
June 8, 2022 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
Today, Wednesday, June 8, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is fueling rapid inflation and slowing global growth. “We are not projecting a recession ” at this time, said Mathias Cormann, the organization’s secretary general, but the organization lowered its estimate of global growth to 3% in 2022 from the 4.% percent it predicted at the end of last year. It estimated that average inflation among the organization’s member nations was likely to run close to 9% this year, double its previous forecast.
June 7, 2022 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
The World Bank cut its forecast for global economic expansion in 2022–again–to 2.9%. The institution warned of years of above-average inflation and below-average growth ahead. That combination, the bank said, has the potential destabilize low- and middle-income economies.
