While the headline print of this morning's Empire Fed beat expectations, as we noted earlier, the underlying characteristics were an unimitgated disaster by any measure. The current business climate, reflecting more a rear-view-mirror-based world was weak but the future expectations index - which should be more important for an equity market that supposedly discounts the future - had some significant headline risk. There is however, one chart that sums up the confidence of the CEOs in this nation. Capital Expenditure expectations (the measure of reinvesting in organic growth producing assets - as opposed to buybacks and shareholder-reacharound funding) plunged at its fastest rate on record and printed at its lowest since the collapse in 2008/9. It seems, to us at least, that the future is not so bright.
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Charts: Bloomberg