And the hits just keep on coming.
Following today's misses in PPI and Empire Fed, it was up to the Fed's April report [2]of Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization to provide at least some validity to Tepper's latest CNBC preachings. Alas, that did not come and moments ago we got the latest disappointments as IP dropped -0.5% on expectations of a -0.2% drop, driven by a drop in Manufacturing Production which dropped 0.4%, despite expectations of a +0.1% increase. Utilities sliding -3.7% did not help the headline print but at least it allowed the Fed to, you got it, blame the weather, only this time there is a twist: the Fed actually blamed the weather for not being as bad as it was in March for the slack in Utility production. One really can't make this up. And confirming that the slack in the economy is structural and not cyclical as the Fed would wants us to believe was the Capacity Utilization print which tumbled from 78.3% to 77.8%, the lowest since January, and resulting from a decline in both Manufacturing and Utilities utilization.
[3]
From the report:
Industrial production decreased 0.5 percent in April after having increased 0.3 percent in March and 0.9 percent in February. Manufacturing output moved down 0.4 percent in April after a decline of 0.3 percent in March. The index for utilities decreased 3.7 percent in April, as heating demand fell back to a more typical seasonal level after having been elevated in March because of unusually cold weather. The output of mines increased 0.9 percent in April. At 98.7 percent of its 2007 average, total industrial production was 1.9 percent above its year-earlier level. The rate of capacity utilization for total industry decreased 0.5 percentage point to 77.8 percent, a rate 0.1 percentage point above its level of a year earlier but 2.4 percentage points below its long-run (1972--2012) average.
And with that the only question is how long until today's latest batch of horrible economic data sends the "market" to new highs. Or does CNBC need to drag back Tepper so that the billionaire investor can frontrun himself a little more and give his future purchases of stocks a higher cost basis?