Recession

“Fed Chair Janet Yellen will be forced to either acknowledge labor market tightening as reason to continue with the four-hike schedule for 2016 or risk her credibility, belittle job market stability and sound a warning about the risks of lower oil prices and cheap gasoline (sacrilege to regular Americans) by slowing the hiking pace after a single 0.25 percent increase last month. If she gets it wrong, things could get ugly fast."

"Today we feast, for tomorrow we die..."

There’s more than a whiff of 2008 in the air. The sources of systemic financial sector risk are different this time (they always are), but China and the global industrial/commodity complex are even larger tectonic plates than the US housing market, and their shifts are no less destructive. There’s also more than a whiff of 1938 in the air, as we have a Fed that is apparently hell-bent on raising rates even as a Category 5 deflationary hurricane heads our way, even as the yield curve continues to flatten.

Earlier today, Art Cashin summarized most (very desperate) traders' thoughts when he said that as a result of today's market crash, "the Fed will try anything" to prop up the wealth effect it had so carefully engineered with seven years of central planning in the aftermath of the financial crisis.  Yet one person who is far less sanguine abou the latest in a long series of central bank bailouts of the stock market is Macro-Allocation's Paul Brodsky, who believes that instead of the Fed Put, the time of the Fed Call has come.

For the first time in three years and before that the recession, the total volume of freight moved by road, rail, pipeline, inland waterways and air has fallen Y/Y. Meanwhile, on the high seas, the Baltic Dry has collapsed under 400. 

BofAML says that clients are no longer in "denial" about recession/bear market risks; but clients not yet willing to "accept" we are already well into a normal, cyclical recession/bear market.

How about now?

Just as Wholesale inventories-to-sales ratios flash recessionary signals so Business inventrories-to-sales point to US heading towards an inventory-dump recession. At 1.38x, the ratio is the highest since the last crisis as both sales and inventories fell Mom but year-over-year, sales tumble (-1.4% YoY) and inventories rise (1.6% YoY).

There comes a time when you just have to admit you were wrong... You were wrong. Industrial Production plunged 1.8% year-over-year - the fastest pace of collapse since May 2008 and a level that has never not produced a recession.

American consumers curbed their spending in December, a lackluster finish to a year marked by slowing consumption despite a steadily improving labor market and months of cheap gasoline.  But the biggest disappointment was the Retail Sales ex auto which was down 0.1% in December, below the 0.2% expected. Putting this miss in context, 66 out of 69 economists thought December retail sales ex autos would've been higher than actual. So much for those "gas savings" prompting Americans to spend, spend, spend...

Against hope-strewnm expectations of a bounce from -4.6 to -4, Empire Fed printed a disastrous -19.37 - the largest miss on record. New orders collapsed, shipments plunged, and employees and workweek continue to contract. Forward-looking employment expectations also plunged. The last time Empire Fed crashed to these levels was the immediate aftermath of the Lehman bankuptcy and the global financial crisis and the peak of the recession in 2001... but we are sure this is just transitory.

 by a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens

"The Alberta Public Service is made up of hard working and dedicated women and men who do valuable work each and every day in the service of Albertans. However, to maintain stability and protect jobs within the public service, we must deal with the economic realities we’re facing.”

Following a comprehensive review of China's housing market, we now realize it's much worse than the consensus understands.

Since 2011, when the E/P ratio for those with less than a high school diploma bottomed, that metric has regained almost two-thirds of its recessionary losses (orange line in chart). But the E/P ratio for high school or college graduates – i.e., eight out of nine American adults – has not recovered any of its recessionary losses, and has barely budged in four years (purple line). This data underscores how the jobs recovery has been spearheaded by cheap labor, with job gains going disproportionately to the least educated — and lowest-paid — workers.

Norway is in trouble. As we have detailed previously (here, here, here, and here), the world's largest sovereign wealth fund has begun liquidating assets (after its largest quarterly loss) as the nation faces recessionary fears (key data deterioration as oil stays lower for longer) with expectations building (despite denials by the central bank) that ZIRP (or even NIRP) is coming. Why? Simple - as the following real-time map shows - every one of Norway's oil fields are currently underwater!