If you want to get a sense of what’s happening in the world, your best bet is to ignore Government data and focus on corporate revenues.
Why revenues? Because earnings can be massaged any number of ways (depreciation methods, laying off staff to cut costs, depletion of loan loss reserves for banks, etc.). But you cannot fake actual money coming in the door.
With that in mind, I want to draw your attention to the recent drop in corporate revenues at a number of corporations including Proctor and Gamble, Starbucks, AT&T, CB Richard Ellis, Safeway, American Express, IBM.
If this doesn’t serve as evidence that real economy falling to pieces, I don’t know what does. To top it off, we can now add Wal-Mart, the single largest retailer, to the list. Wal-Mart just reported that same-store sales fell 1.4%.
This is the first time this has happened in six quarters.
So much for the “recovery” theory. If you look at the real economy, things are getting worse and worse. When even Wal-Mart reports that people are spending less (remember that corporate email that February sales were a “disaster”?) you KNOW things are bad.
Folks, something awful is brewing in the economy. And yet, against this backdrop, stocks continue to rally hard. This bubble is worse than anything I’ve seen in my career, including the 2007 top.
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Best Regards
Graham Summers