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Preliminary October Consumer Confidence Comes At 69.4, Below September 73.5 And Below Expectations Of 73.5
The Reuters/University of Michigan index fell to 69.4 in early October,
below the 73.5 final September reading, and below economists' expectations of unchanged (73.5). The biggest factor for the drop was the decline in consumer expectations which was down a substantial 5.9 points to 67.6, well below expectations, while current conditions came in at 72.1, in line with consensus.
Additionally, consumers now expect inflation to pick up to 2.8% in the upcoming year, well above the prior month's 2.2%. As this is very volatile series, and as the consumer in general is easily influenced by such indications of price and not value as the stock market, expect future data to continue fluctuating wildly.
Most interesting is the divergence between personal financial situation assessment and the overall optimism on the economy (which also is starting to decline). From Reuters:
Survey director Richard Curtin noted that while consumers expected
gains in the general economy and for unemployment to reach cyclical
peaks, there has been no positive improvement in their assessment of
their personal financial situation. 'The divergence between prospects
for the general economy and personal finances is unique in the history
of the surveys, and can be expected to have a negative impact on the
pace of the recovery,' Curtin said.
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This can't be? I thought the recovery was a done deal? My 401(k), which became a 201(k) and is now a 301(k), needs some more pumping.
There must be something wrong with the numbers. Run them again. Ask different people. Someone put their thumb on the scale because we need a couple more months of irrational exuberance if I'm going to retire in 5 years.
Where is Greenspan when you need him?
thats the truth..
The interesting thing on the stock market is that even blow out numbers are not pushing share prices higher, look at INTC. So clearly expectations and valutions are well up there now, and if stocks are not going up when they have blow out numbers, when are they?
IBM beat - stock down almost 5%
JPM knocked it out the park, stock has done very little.
It might be a bit early to declare at this point but my experience is that stock market bottoms end in a bang and a sharp reversal but stock market tops end in a whimper and a relatively gentle roll over.
Not sure at this point because tops usually end on good news, not bad news. But with all this juice, everything is distorted.
AAPL on Monday might tell us a lot. If that misses, and rolls over, we might have a problem.
but look at GOOG (which, just last year, people were still asking where the hell are its future revenues supposed to come from?)
That was my thought last night when I heard that AMD and IBM beat but were trading lower. Usual sign of a top.
Altman on Bloomberg:
1. Financial rally produced great wealth and confidence in economy
2. We need government to stay involved for great success in recovery
NYU a fully owned subsidiary of GS?
Clearly, Michigan is not "God's green acre" these days.
Wait until the weather turns colder. Could get downright ugly.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/MGIC-Investment-Corporation-prnews-2638859...
MTG results. MTG insures loans for the GSEs, i.e. middle to lower class Americans.
Further proof the middle class is being slaughtered, I would argue intentionally. All roads lead to serfdom.
Exccccccellent... this can only mean one thing
More stimulus!
That's the correct answer.
And cowbell, of course.
Can't have stimulus without a generous helping of cowbell.
"
Survey director Richard Curtin noted that while consumers expected gains in the general economy and for unemployment to reach cyclical peaks, there has been no positive improvement in their assessment of their personal financial situation"
Translation:
I am not doing better but all I hear about is green shoots. They must be out there. Somewhere! I'm jealous of all the people that must be doing so great. Even though I don't know any.
No.
Translation: The middle class is being intentionally slaughtered, and they are finally waking up to that fact.
Makes me wonder if the pace of American depositors at Canadian banks might actually drift up in response as the situation deteriorates? After all, doesn't capital flight move down the food chain during periods of bank instability in relationship to information symmetry? Looking at the flow funds reports is would appear as though we have seen increased action in capital outflows from the top.
Good point, with the Internet it is pretty easy to open up an overseas depost account, all IRS-legit of course, but it is a smart thing to get your wealth out of USD. All fiats are screwed in the long run, but for liquidity, better off holding that part in a better fiat.
When the one-world-currency comes out, the translation for CAD will be better than USD, the USD is still artificially propped up due to world reserve status, once it is replaced by a new world reserve currency, that premium evaporates.
Reserve status premium is probably worth 30 on the DXY. That is the only thing separating us from Zimbabwe at this point.
Harley (HOG) saying that this is as bad as it's ever been; they are dropping a brand altogether, and trying to sell another. Lots of layoffs still coming, on top of the many rounds they've already had. In fact, they were almost on the brink of having to close their Milwaukee manufacturing...
Stock is up for the 10th day IN A ROW, new 52-wk high.
Pure dollar play? Last of the American manufacturers.
Lot's of 150 lb Chinese guys will be trading in their 50cc bikes for 1200cc Harleys once HD moves to the central kingdom.
Inverse correlation betwen stocks and dollar in 1 chart
http://www.fundmymutualfund.com/2009/10/inverse-correlation-of-stocks-an...
The dollar and the S&P 500 have completely switched spots since April 2009
Now we see if B52 Bomber Bernanke can break the rubber band
only happens on down days......
10/16 01:12PM *DJ Nasdaq Institutes Floor-Wide Trading Halt On Phila Stock Exchange-CNBC
Cheers Lizzy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-cje17OGnQ
Harvey Korman - lol
Thanks
That's very strange that on OP-Ex an exchange that accounts for what, almost 25% of options volume goes down?
And look what the market has done since the 12:40 announcement.
Very interesting.
And the markets immediately gain back half of today's losses...
Very interesting. But of course this is simply random events happening, similar to 100 monkeys pounding away at typewriters for 1000 years to produce Hamlet.
Right? Correct? That's the cover story, right? Did I miss a memo?
It appears that the Government and MSM propaganda has been effective in convincing Americans that "the economy" is getting better, primarily by ramping the Dow to a nice round number.
The same propaganda machine has apparently been less effective at convincing Americans that there is more money in their own checking accounts.
At least that's what I read into this report.
I am middleclass, was upper middle class for a minute but now lower middleclass (or is it the whole class is lower). In 2006 I made 138k as an IT consultant. Now I make 55K and my job is about as secure as juggling eggs. I've been soap-boxing for years that our economy is being hollowed out (yes, even when I was doing quite well). Now it is hollow. My first decade in the work force has left me with nothing. I paid my student loans down from 19K to 12K. I have no savings. My credit has been destroyed. Some bastard even stole my mountain bike and I can't afford a new one. My car is 10 years old and not so healthy. I'm pissed... but all I can think to do is keep begging people to stop banking with BofA or Wells and stop shopping at Walmart and stop investing in these companies as well. My sentiment...PISSED OFF...but what else can I do?
Sir/maam, you are a poster child for what the govt and Fed are trying to do - wipe out the middle class and increase the serf class.
As much as people here like to fantasize about Revolution, the truth is WTSHTF, most Americans will be screaming for the government to take care of them.
We are a nation of weaklings, over-coddled throughout childhood, over-protected by the nanny state.
Perfect dupes to be controlled.
Hey, look, the stock market is up 50%, your wealth has been preserved. Never mind the global purchasing power of your dollar has been destroyed.
(35 year old male, served in our Navy, got the computer science degree I was told that we needed.) I don't know what pisses me off more: The fact that the greedy bastards are eating us alive or that my peers, the ingo-sheeple around me keep saying shit like "at least I still have a job" or "at least I wasn't born in China". Enough of the glass half full shit!!!!!
I for one do not have any skin left in the game. If I had two pennies to rub together I'd be short both pennies.
But I disagree, the government has not done shit for me and I don't think most people expect much from them. (You're talking about the poor.) The working class is just too mezmorized by their flat screen tvs still. However, we are violent by nature and there is a thin line between order and chaos in a country with more far more guns than people.
The lack of a representative government is our problem. Unfortunately, you live in a country where the government works for the multinationals and actually raffles off the people to the lowest bidding corporation. As unemployment of Americans mounts, Congress continues to offshore America’s jobs and bring in off shore labor to replace Americans.
Multiple thousands of E-3, F, H-1B, J, and L-1 visas are used to drive down compensation in America, to facilitate off-shoring, and to facilitate age discrimination.
Our problem is multinational employers such as Bill Gates. Consider this dialog in testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology in 2008 where Gates calls for an increase in the 65,000 a year base cap on H-1B visas (total limit more than 85K), saying delay had already “exacerbated an already grave situation... in the U.S. economy’s demand for skilled professionals…”
Gates: “As a result, many U.S. firms, including Microsoft, have been forced to locate staff in countries that welcome skilled foreign workers to do work that could otherwise have been done in the United States, if it were not for our counterproductive immigration policies. Last year, for example, Microsoft was unable to obtain H-1B visas for one-third of the highly qualified foreign-born job candidates that we wanted to hire…
“[W]hen we bring in these world-class engineers, we create jobs around them… (Actually U.S. engineers have been proven better and newly-hired American university graduates “become productive within 30 days or so” as compared to, say Indian university graduates at 3-6 months.)
Rep. Dana Rohrabacker (R-CA): “But according to BusinessWeek, almost 150,000 computer programmers have lost their jobs in this country since the year 2000. Now, my reading of all this (from Gates' testimony) is that there are plenty of people out there to hire but people want to have the top quality people from India and China and elsewhere, and they’re willing to have these 150,000 American computer programmers just go unemployed.”
(There is no requirement that H-1B visa applicants be “highly skilled.” Indeed, the US Labor Department data show that 56% of applications filed are for H-1B workers with the lowest skill level [level 1 of 4] http://www.cis.org/article/2007/back407.html )
Gates: Actually, BusinessWeek doesn’t do surveys. I think you’re referring to a quote in BusinessWeek from an Urban Institute study…
Rohrabacker: That’s what I said, according to BusinessWeek.
Gates: It's not according to BusinessWeek. There was a study that a group at Urban Institute did that was deeply flawed in terms of how it defined what an engineer is. When we say that these jobs are going begging, we're in business every day. We're not kidding about it. These jobs are going begging, and the result is that in a competitive economy ...
Rohrabacher: You'd have to raise wages.
Gates: No, wages are –
Rohrabacher: If a job's going begging, you raise wages, now in a –
Gates: No, it's not an issue of raising wages. These jobs are very, very, very high-paying jobs. And we are hiring as many of these people as we can.
(Rohrabacker’s time was called.)
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/134123.asp
From 1999 through 2005 H-1B visas approved (initial renewed+extended) totaled 1,692,683 (USCIS): H-1B visas issued (DoS) for the same period totaled 1,130,579. An additional 135,861 were issued in 2006.
Oh yeah, as a computer scientist who never even had the oppurtunity to interview with Microsoft, trust me, I'm well aware of Mr. Gates and his line of BS. Also I can say that I've NEVER met a single highly skilled H1B computer programmer. All I've seen them be good at is stinking up their cubicle and embelishing their resume. My student visa classmates were mostly cheating their way through the computer science program.
I've never bought the lies we've been fed. "Offshore computer programming jobs and you'll get an even better job right here in America". "Oh yeah? Like what job? Explain how that works?" "You just don't understand it, but trust me this is good for you also don't you have money in our stock purchase program?" "I have like 20 shares...so you say offshore my job so that I can make a 100 bucks on my stock?" "Go back to your cubicle, you don't understand" "You beleive anything they tell you and then you pass thier lies on to us" "Do you want to keep your job?"
"and below economists' expectations of unchanged"
That pretty much says it, I think. I know it is a volatile series, but the disconnect here is the same as in government. They 'saved' the banks and now they think the poor saps who are going to have to pay for it should be grateful. The view from the middle class right now is very, very different than the one the aristocrats have.
F shaped recovery.
A major force driving the DOW is the financial sector’s desire to uphold consumer confidence in the economy, IMO, to smooth the way for passage of Obama’s major health care legislation--the most critical issue for the socialism Democrats in the last fifty years.
Barack Obama is president because the primary movers in the financial sector such as Goldman and JPM wanted him to be. If the Obama Administration is to enact its social and economic programs, both of which major Wall Street movers support, it has only a few short weeks before the 2010 congressional electioneering begins. Democrats are facing substantial losses in both houses and Obama’s successes will never be the same after those mid-year elections.
Now is the time for the super majorities that the Democrats enjoy (thanks to the incredible negative performance of George Bush) to get their programs through. Socialized health care, where the government will call the shots on one-sixth of the nation’s economy, will benefit portions of Wall Street as never before. And, at this moment, the Democrats, needing all the help they can get, are getting the extra push from the PPT. A rising stock market, the only evidence at all that the economy is recovering, is demonstrating the financial leaders’ hope that the huge tax-related health care endeavor will be accepted by the people on the illusion of a healthy economy.
R and D are both the same. This partisan claptrap is a red herring. Wise up, you're being played.
"A major force driving the DOW is the financial sector’s desire to uphold consumer confidence in the economy,"
Close. Substitute "financial sector's" with "Fed's".
Anyone reading this site circa April/May knows there was tons of evidence implicating the Fed in propping up the market.
I swear, I will never forget for as long as I live, the day I went to take a piss at 12:30, came back at 12:40, and the S&P jumped 20 pts in those ten minutes. This was sometime in April. Manipulation, pure and simple.
That nails it, ghost. Mandrake the Magician. Now you see it, now you don't. The Fed!
time for a cash for christmas program....