U.S. oil benchmark West Texas Intermediate fell 0.57% today to $71.74 a barrel and international benchmark Brent crude lost 0.46% to $76.31 a barrel. In spite of a big cut in production announced this weekend by Saud Arabia. The voluntary cut of an extra 1 million barrels a day in July will take Saudi production to its lowest level in years.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warned, today, that the federal government would be at risk of a default as soon as July if lawmakers fail to raise the debt limit. The Treasury Department is currently using accounting gimmicks to keep paying federal obligations, after hitting the statutory debt ceiling last month. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen signaled last month that those measures would enable Treasury to keep paying the government’s bills at least until early June. Today’s CBO estimate is, thus, an updated timeline.
It’s CPI inflation report time again. On Tuesday morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics will report the Consumer Price Index for January. Expectations are for a mixed result with the annual rate continuing to fall from the 6.5% year-over-year headline rate in December for the CPI. But with inflation rising month-over-month for the first time in three months.
My one-hundred-and-fifty-fourth YouTube video “Strong Dollar Hits Stocks–3 Things to Do” went up today. The biggest factor driving falling prices in commodities (ahem, oil) is the rising strength of the dollar. Believe it or not, the US economy is faring better than other trading partners. That combined with rising interest rates makes for a stronger dollar. In this video, I provide three picks to address this issue as I continue to expect rate hikes from the Fed.
Inflation as measured by the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index, the Fed’s preferred inflation measure, rose by 6.4% in the year through February, the government reported today. That’s the fastest inflation rate on this scale since 1982. PCE inflation ran at an annual rate of 6.1% in January. The core index climbed at a 5.4% rate after stripping out food and fuel costs. In January the core PCE ran at an annual 5.2% rate.
A record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in September. September’s “quit” numbers constituted 3% of the workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s up from the previous record set in August, when 4.3 million people quit their jobs — about 2.9% of the workforce.
