We Just Broke 2008′s Record for the Fastest Economic Unraveling!
In my last piece I provided a technical analysis that signaled we are entering the first stage of a bursting bubble that we’ll call the Fed Bubble. Now while I do believe technicals provide good insight to the economic landscape I see them as a necessary rather sufficient qualifier. In order to be truly confident that our technicals are providing an accurate story we need to understand the fundamentals behind the charts, as we often find the engine light comes on due to a loose wire rather than a problem with the engine.
The final Q1 GDP revision was just released and we saw that GDP has again missed expectations by such a large margin that 2015 is another write off for a 3% growth year. Almost comically we heard the same excuses we got last year. “Weather was wintery and next year is going to be the turnaround year”. So in order to explain to these supposed economic and market ‘experts’ who seem wholly incapable of understanding economic and market forces with any sense of accuracy, let’s run through a few fundamentals.
I want to hone in on the category of consumer spending that is first to go away so that we may capture the first signals of a consumer spending pull back. A good proxy for this is the Johnson Redbook Chain Store yoy sales. This captures the consumer spending taking place at large department stores (Macy’s, Kohls, Walmart, Kmart, etc). This is going to be where the real discretionary retail spending takes place, as in do I have enough space on my credit card for that sassy blue dress and groceries or just groceries? And don’t think that is just a theatrical example. I remember the days of asking myself those very same questions (ok maybe not the blue dress but you get the idea). That is just real life here in the US (and Canada for that matter).
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