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Dollar’s Purchasing Power Drops to Lowest Ever. Inflation Heats Up, as Fed Wants, After Simultaneous Supply & Demand Shocks

August 13, 2020

Dollar’s Purchasing Power Drops to Lowest Ever. Inflation Heats Up, as Fed Wants, After Simultaneous Supply & Demand Shocks

“We’re not even thinking about thinking about” slowing the decline of the dollar’s purchasing power — and thereby labor’s purchasing power.

A supply shock and a demand shock came together during the Pandemic, and it produced chaos in the pricing environment. There was a sudden collapse in demand in some segments of the economy – restaurants, gasoline, jet fuel, for example – and a surge in demand in other segments, such as eating at home, and anything to do with ecommerce, including transportation services focused on it.

These shifts came together with supply-chain interruptions and supply chains that were unprepared for the big shifts, leading to shortages in some parts of the economy – the supply shock. There were empty shelves in stores, while product was piling up with no buyers in other parts of the economy.

The sectors surrounding gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel fuel – oil and gas drilling, equipment manufacturers, transportation services, refineries, etc. – were thrown into turmoil as demand vanished, leading to a total collapse in energy prices. In April, in a bizarre moment in the history of the oil business, the price of the US benchmark crude WTI collapsed to negative -$37 a barrel.

Since then, the price of crude oil has risen sharply (now at positive +$41 a barrel), as demand for gasoline has returned to near-normal while demand for jet fuel remains in collapse-mode, as people are driving to go on vacations, instead of flying, and as business travel is essentially shut down.

As a result, for a few months, all of the inflation data was going haywire, with some prices plunging and others spiking. This is now being worked out of the system.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

No Payment, No Problem: Bizarre New World of Consumer Debt

August 8, 2020

No Payment, No Problem: Bizarre New World of Consumer Debt

All kinds of weird records are being broken. But it’s scheduled to expire, and then what?

The New York Fed released a doozie of a household credit report. It summarized what individual lenders have been reporting about their own practices: If you can’t make the payments on your mortgage, auto loan, credit card debt, or student loan, just ask for a deferral or forbearance, and you won’t have to make the payments, and the loan won’t count as delinquent if it wasn’t delinquent before. And even if it was delinquent before, you can “cure” a delinquency by getting the loan deferred and modified. No payment, no problem.

Nearly all student loans go into forbearance, delinquencies plunge.

Student loan borrowers were automatically rolled into forbearance under the CARES Act, and even though many students had stopped making payments, delinquency rates plunged because the Department of Education had decided to report as “current” all those loans that are in forbearance, even if they were delinquent. Yup, according to New York Fed data, the delinquency rate of student loan borrowers, though many had stopped making payments, plunged from 10.75% in Q1, to 6.97% in Q2, the lowest since 2007:

Student loan forbearance is available until September 30, and interest is waived until then, instead of being added to the loan. In a blog post, the New York Fed said that 88% of the student-loan borrowers, including private-loan borrowers and Federal Family Education Loan borrowers, had a “scheduled payment of $0,” meaning that at least 88% of the student loans were in some form of forbearance. Until September 30. And then what?

Delinquent loans are “cured” without catch-up payments.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US Crude Oil Production Plunged Most Ever, Natural Gas Followed: The Great American Oil & Gas Bust, Phase 2

August 6, 2020

US Crude Oil Production Plunged Most Ever, Natural Gas Followed: The Great American Oil & Gas Bust, Phase 2

Precisely what’s needed to end the price collapse. But last time, it wasn’t long before Wall Street liquidity surged back into shale, starting the cycle all over again.

US crude oil production in May plunged by 1.99 million barrels per day, from 12 million b/d in April to 10 million b/d, the largest monthly drop since at least 1980, and the sixth monthly drop in a row, according to the EIA.

This comes after the collapse in demand for transportation fuels – especially gasoline and jet fuel – that started in March and exacerbated the oil glut and a downward spiral of the already depressed prices for crude oil. Amid a torrent of bankruptcy filings by oil-and-gas companies, drillers cut drilling activity and production. This trend restarted last year, after having subsided somewhat following phase 1 of the Great American Oil Bust in 2015-2016, but took on record proportions during the Pandemic. From the peak in November 2019 of 12.86 million b/d, production has now plunged by 22.2%:

In the chart above, note how production doubled between mid-2012 and November 2019, despite the drop in production in 2015-2016.

The chart below shows the the price of benchmark crude oil grade West Texas Intermediate. Note how the price recovery from late 2016 ended in the fall of 2018 and then reversed, as production surged. The price decline bottomed out on April 20, when for a brief period the price of WTI plunged below zero, a bizarre moment in the history of crude oil:

Texas, the state with by far the largest production in the US and the epicenter of the oil-and-gas bankruptcy filings, was also the state with the largest production cuts, in terms of million b/d. Peak production occurred in March 2020 at 5.44 million b/d. By May production had plunged 19% to 4.39 million b/d.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Confession Time for Big Banks in Europe: Banco Santander Reports $12.7 Billion Loss

July 30, 2020

Confession Time for Big Banks in Europe: Banco Santander Reports $12.7 Billion Loss

Too-Big-To-Fail Santander is also one of the Eurozone’s worst capitalized banks.

Banco Santander, Spain’s largest lender and one of the Eurozone’s eight global systemically important banks (G-SIBs), has posted its first ever loss in 163 years of operations. And it was gargantuan. During the first half of the year, the bank racked up a loss of €10.8 billion ($12.7 billion).

The loss was caused by heavy provisions for expected loan losses. This quarter wiped out the equivalent of one-and-a-half years of the bank’s global profits — in 2019, it posted total global profits of €6.5 billion, and in 2018 of €7.8 billion.

The losses were the result of a €2.5 billion charge related to the recoverability of tax deferred assets as well a €10.1 billion write-down on assets across a number of key overseas markets:

In the UK: €6.1 billion write-down of “goodwill” — amount overpaid for prior acquisitions, which included Abbey National and Alliance and Leicester. Santander already took a €1.5 billion write-down on the value of its UK business last year, blaming new regulations and the expected economic fallout from Brexit.
In the US: €2.3 billion write-down for Santander Consumer USA, which specializes in consumer lending, particularly subprime lending, and these consumer loans are now particularly at risk.
In Poland, its largest market in Eastern Europe: €1.2 billion goodwill impairments charge.
In its consumer finance division, which is present in 15 markets: €477 million hit.

Santander’s shares initially reacted to the news by slumping 5.8%. They then staged a partial recovery, only to slump again, ending the day down nearly 5%. Shares are down an eye-watering 45% this year, making it one of the continent’s worst-performing large financial institutions.

“The past six months have been among the most challenging in our history,” Santander’s Chairwoman Ana Botin said in a statement. “The impact of the pandemic has tested us all.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Coal Consumption Plunged to Lowest Since at Least 1973. Why There’s No Hope for Coal

July 29, 2020

Coal Consumption Plunged to Lowest Since at Least 1973. Why There’s No Hope for Coal

It comes down to costs and being bypassed by technological innovation, amid stagnating demand for electricity:

Arrival of “combined cycle” natural gas power plants in the 1990s.
Collapse in price of natural gas since 2008 due to fracking.
Surging wind power production in TX, OK, KS, IA.
Decades-long decline of industrial use of coal.

Consumption of coal by US power plants in April plunged 30% from April last year, to the lowest level in the monthly data going back to 1973, the EIA reported today. This was down 19% from April 1973.

A process of many years: Peak monthly consumption of coal by US power plants occurred from 2003 through 2008 when during the hot summer months (air conditioning) caused coal consumption to rise to 95-99 million short tons. In 2019, the peak month was July, when coal consumption by power plants was down to 56 million short tons. And this year, given the relentless trend over the past 12 years, July consumption will be lower still:

“King coal,” as it was called in the 1990s when it was still the dominant fuel for power plants, was heavily wounded by a technological innovation, the Combined Cycle Gas Turbine power plant, commercialized in the 1990s.

A CCGT power plant uses natural gas to fuel a combustion turbine, similar to a turbine in a jet aircraft. It then uses the hot exhaust gases to heat water into high-pressure steam that drives a steam turbine. Both turbines drive generators to generate electricity. The thermal efficiency of a CCGT plant has reached about 65%.

Coal power plants just create high pressure steam that drives a steam turbine. At the time, their thermal efficiency was below 40%. The rest was waste heat.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Media Continues to Misreport Unemployment: 31.8 Million People on State & Federal Unemployment Insurance. Week 18 of U.S. Labor Market Collapse

July 24, 2020

Media Continues to Misreport Unemployment: 31.8 Million People on State & Federal Unemployment Insurance. Week 18 of U.S. Labor Market Collapse

I get tired of reporters or bots who don’t read beyond the 2nd paragraph of Labor Department press releases. 2.35 million initial state and federal unemployment claims. PUA claims (gig workers) now 41% of total unemployment. 20% of labor force on unemployment insurance.

It just doesn’t let up. An astounding number of newly laid-off workers keeps filing for unemployment benefits week after week and pile on top of the people already unemployed. And the number of people who started working again isn’t big enough to make a visible dent in the curve.

In the week ended July 18, the total number of people who continued to claim unemployment compensation under all state and federal unemployment insurance programs, including gig workers and contract workers, edged down to 31.8 million (not seasonally adjusted), as reported by the Department of Labor this morning. It was the third highest level ever and just a tad off the peak:

Unabated lazy misreporting in the media.

If you read this morning or heard on the radio that 16.2 million people were claiming unemployment insurance – the “continued claims” – and you thought that there were only 16.2 million people who claimed unemployment benefits, you fell victim to lazy misreporting in the media, by reporters or bots that didn’t read the Labor Department’s press release beyond the second paragraph.

Those 16.2 million were only the claims under state programs, and do not include the claims under federal programs. All combined, there were 31.8 million people on the unemployment rolls. That’s what the Labor Department reported further down in the press release.

There is a huge difference between 16.2 million and 31.8 million unemployed people!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Update on the WTF-Collapse of Consumption of Gasoline, Jet Fuel & Diesel

July 23, 2020

Update on the WTF-Collapse of Consumption of Gasoline, Jet Fuel & Diesel

Folks started driving again – including those who used to take mass-transit. But jet fuel demand is still in collapse-mode. And overall consumption remains way down.

Ridership on San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) trains was still down 89% in June, compared to June last year, according to BART. Not because the Bay Area economy has collapsed by 89% — it has not — but because many people are working from home, and those people who do go to work are driving to avoid the infection risks associated with riding on a commuter train. Driving-instead-of-taking-mass-transit is playing out across the US. And we’re seeing some of that in gasoline demand. But jet fuel consumption is still in collapse mode. And diesel consumption has been down sharply for over a year.

Starting in mid-March, demand for gasoline collapsed in a historic manner. By now 32 million people are claiming unemployment compensation under state and federal programs, and many others switched to work from home, and both groups quit driving to work. Gasoline consumption at the low point in the week ended April 3 plunged by -48% year-over-year, to just 6.7 million barrels per day, the lowest in the EIA’s data going back to 1991.

Folks started driving again, bit by bit, to go to work, and because it’s summer driving season. In the week ended July 17, gasoline consumption, at 8.55 million barrels per day, was down 11.6% year-over-year, according to EIA data. Consumption of gasoline has been in the minus-6% to minus-12% range now for the fifth week in a row, with the latest week being the steepest decline:

The EIA tracks consumption in terms of product supplied by refineries, blenders, etc., and not by retail sales at gas stations.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Demand to Remain Suppressed” till Vaccine/Treatment Widely Available: United Airlines. May Not Happen till Late 2021 “or Even Later”: Health Care Leaders

July 22, 2020

“Demand to Remain Suppressed” till Vaccine/Treatment Widely Available: United Airlines. May Not Happen till Late 2021 “or Even Later”: Health Care Leaders

Flattened-out fish-hook-shaped recovery of demand?

Passenger revenues collapsed by 94% to just $681 million, United Airlines disclosed in its Q2 earnings report today. Other operating revenues plunged by 37% to $392 million, but cargo was hot, rising 36% to $402 million “by serving strategic international cargo-only missions and optimizing aircraft capacity with low passenger demand.” All combined, revenues collapsed by 87%.

This has now become the serenade by airlines to investors. United follows Delta in it: Revenues have totally collapsed, and we’re in an existential crisis, and we’re cutting costs and capacity like maniacs, and we need to shed tens of thousands of employees, to reduce our cash burn, but we’ve raised many billions of dollars from you all (thank you) and from taxpayers, and we will duly burn this cash during this crisis.

United burned $40 million a day in Q2. It expects to reduce this cash burn to $25 million a day in Q3 – about $2.3 billion in the quarter – and reduce it further in Q4.

United said today it has slashed operating costs by 54%” compared to Q2 last year; this includes expenses for fuel, which were down 90%, aircraft maintenance down 74%, landing fees down 35%, and its largest line item, salaries down 29%.

Those are huge cuts. Earlier in July, in a dreary assessment of the airline industry and traffic, including a renewed decline in ticket sales starting in late June, United announced 36,000 “involuntary furloughs” on or after October 1 if it can’t entice those employees to leave voluntarily beforehand.

Despite the cost cuts, United lost $2 billion in the quarter.

And it said that it expects its system capacity in Q3 to still be down by 65% compared to Q3 last year. And it will cancel flights and adjust capacity “until it sees signs of a recovery in demand.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Uneven” Freight Recovery after New Covid Outbreaks: Daily Truck Trips Already Fell 10% Since June 25

July 17, 2020

“Uneven” Freight Recovery after New Covid Outbreaks: Daily Truck Trips Already Fell 10% Since June 25

Was June as Good as It’s Going to Get in the Pandemic Era?

Automakers have been reopening their assembly plants in the US, hobbled by setbacks, including supply chain issues. Other manufacturers too have reopened their plants. Housing construction is moving forward. Other construction segments are weaker. Oil-and-gas drilling – a vast industry in the US with big impact on equipment manufacturing, construction, real estate, technology, transportation, etc. – is melting down, with big bankruptcies happening now densely together. California Resources, the largest driller in California, filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday, following Chesapeake at the end of June. Ecommerce retail is booming, but brick-and-mortar retail in malls is in a death spiral. So in terms of the goods-based sectors, it’s a very mixed bag. And the freight industry tracks those sectors because all these goods must be shipped.

In June, shipment volume by truck, rail, and air in the US ticked up from April and May but was still down by 17.8% from June 2019, and by 22% from June 2018, according to the Cass Freight Index for Shipments. The year 2018 had been the Good Times for the industry. The year 2019 was crappy and got worse as it went on. In the year 2020, all heck broke loose when the Pandemic hit the industry that was already grappling with sagging demand. June was the 19th month in a row of year-over-year declines in shipment volume:

The Cass Freight Index tracks the shipment volume by all modes of transportation, but is more concentrated on trucking. It tracks shipments of products for consumers and industrial users, but not bulk commodities, such as grains, coal, or petroleum products.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It Starts: Mortgage Delinquencies Suddenly Soar at Record Pace

July 15, 2020

It Starts: Mortgage Delinquencies Suddenly Soar at Record Pace

And this is just for April, the very beginning of the Pandemic’s impact on housing.

OK, it’s actually worse. Mortgages that are in forbearance and have not missed a payment before going into forbearance don’t count as delinquent. They’re reported as “current.” And 8.2% of all mortgages in the US – or 4.1 million loans – are currently in forbearance, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. But if they did not miss a payment before entering forbearance, they don’t count in the suddenly spiking delinquency data.

The onslaught of delinquencies came suddenly in April, according to CoreLogic, a property data and analytics company (owner of the Case-Shiller Home Price Index), which released its monthly Loan Performance Insights today. And it came after 27 months in a row of declining delinquency rates. These delinquency rates move in stages – and the early stages are now getting hit:

Transition from “Current” to 30-days past due: In April, the share of all mortgages that were past due, but less than 30 days, soared to 3.4% of all mortgages, the highest in the data going back to 1999. This was up from 0.7% in April last year. During the Housing Bust, this rate peaked in November 2008 at 2% (chart via CoreLogic):

From 30 to 59 days past due: The rate of these early delinquencies soared to 4.2% of all mortgages, the highest in the data going back to 1999. This was up from 1.7% in April last year.

From 60 to 89 days past due: As of April, this stage had not yet been impacted, with the rate remaining relatively low at 0.7% (up from 0.6% in April last year). This stage will jump in the report to be released a month from now when today’s 30-to-59-day delinquencies, that haven’t been cured by then, move into this stage.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Happens If Most Businesses & Consumers Tighten Their Belts at the Same Time?

July 14, 2020

What Happens If Most Businesses & Consumers Tighten Their Belts at the Same Time?

Europe may be about to find out. 128 days with my Mother-in-Law.

As market players cling to the hope that a V-shaped economic recovery is still possible in Europe, to match the central-bank engineered rebounds of benchmark indexes such as Germany’s DAX and the Netherlands’ AEX, the reality on the ground continues to get worse for many families and businesses. On Tuesday, the Bank of Italy published the findings of a survey of Italian households on the impact of the lockdown. As you’d expect, most of the findings were pretty bleak:

More than half of the respondents said they have suffered a contraction of household income following the measures adopted to contain the epidemic.
Fifteen percent of households have lost more than half their income.
Some 40% of families are struggling to keep up with their mortgage payments.
More than half of the survey’s respondents believe that even when the epidemic is over, they will spend less on travel, holidays, restaurants, cinema and theaters than they did before the crisis.

No V-Shaped Recovery.

For most of these people, there will be no V-shaped recovery. Not only are they spending less money today, they expect to spend less tomorrow. While it’s true that people often say all kinds of stuff in surveys about how they will act in the future and then not stick to it, this particular response chimes with my own experience as well as the accounts I’ve heard from friends and acquaintances in countries as far and wide as Spain (where I live), the UK (where I’m from), Mexico (where my wife is from), France, Argentina and the U.S.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Great American Shale Oil & Gas Massacre: Bankruptcies, Defaulted Debts, Worthless Shares, Collapsed Prices of Oil & Gas

July 11, 2020

The Great American Shale Oil & Gas Massacre: Bankruptcies, Defaulted Debts, Worthless Shares, Collapsed Prices of Oil & Gas

The bankruptcy epicenter is in Texas.

The Great American Oil Bust started in mid-2014, when the price of crude-oil benchmark WTI began its long decline from over $100 a barrel to, briefly, minus -$37 a barrel in April 2020. Bankruptcies of US companies in the oil and gas sector started piling up in 2015. In 2016, the total amount of debt listed in these filings hit $82 billion. Bankruptcy filings continued, with smaller dollar amounts of debt involved. In 2019, the shakeout got rougher.

And this year promises to be a banner year, as larger oil-and-gas companies with billions of dollars in debt collapsed, after having wobbled through the prior years of the oil bust.

The 44 bankruptcy filings in the first half of 2020 among US exploration and production companies (E&P), oilfield services companies (OFS), and “midstream” companies (gather, transport, process, and store oil and natural gas) involved $55 billion in debts, according to data compiled by law firm Haynes and Boone. This first-half total beat all prior full-year totals of the Great American Oil Bust except the full-year total of 2016:

The cumulative amount of secured and unsecured debts that the 446 US oil and gas companies disclosed in their bankruptcy filings from January 2015 through June 2020 jumped to $262 billion:

The three biggies: In the first half of 2020, nine of the 44 US oil and gas companies that filed for bankruptcy listed over $1 billion in debts, including the three biggies with debts ranging from $9 billion to nearly $12 billion, according to data by Haynes and Boone.

These three companies – oil-field services companies Diamond Offshore and McDermott and natural-gas fracking pioneer Chesapeake – are the biggest in terms of debts that have toppled in the Great American Oil Bust so far. Those three companies combined listed $31 billion in debts, accounting for 56% of the $55 billion in total debts listed by all 44 companies to file so far this year:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Seems Counter-Intuitive in This Crisis: Inflation Heats Up for Services Firms, and They’re Able to Pass it on via Higher Prices

July 8, 2020

Seems Counter-Intuitive in This Crisis: Inflation Heats Up for Services Firms, and They’re Able to Pass it on via Higher Prices

Even manufacturers, after months of crushed commodities prices, experience inflation and are able to pass it on. Stimulus money the government and the Fed have thrown around by the trillions.

It seems somewhat counter-intuitive in this crisis that companies in the services and non-manufacturing sectors – which dominate the US economy – would report higher input prices and higher sales prices. And there are now also smaller pricing pressures cropping up in the manufacturing sector.

“Inflationary pressure returned as both input prices and output charges rose for the first time since February, with both increasing at solid rates,” reported IHS Markit this morning in its Services Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) for June.

PMIs are based on responses from executives about their own companies – if particular activities are higher, unchanged, or lower in the current month than they’d been in the prior month. No quantitative measures or dollar amounts are involved.

“Inflationary pressures intensified for the first time since February at the end of the second quarter, as both input prices and output charges increased,” IHS Markit added in its Services PMI.

“Companies registered a solid rise in cost burdens as some suppliers hiked prices following the resumption of operations at service providers. The rate of input price inflation was the fastest since February 2019,” it said.

“In response to higher input costs, firms partially passed on higher supplier prices to clients through greater selling prices. The increase was solid overall and the sharpest for 16 months,” it said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Who Will Get Hit When Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) Blow Up? Banks or Unsuspecting “Market Participants”?

June 30, 2020

Who Will Get Hit When Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) Blow Up? Banks or Unsuspecting “Market Participants”?

Answers emerge from the murky business of CLOs.

There has been quite some hoopla surrounding Collateralized Loan obligations (CLOs) because the underlying leveraged loans – junk-rated loans often used by private equity firms to fund leveraged buyouts (LBO) and other high-risk endeavors such as special dividends – are now starting to come apart. There are approximately $700 billion in US-issued CLOs outstanding.

US banks hold $99 billion of these CLOs, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. The rest are held by various institutional investors, such as insurance companies, pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity firms, and the like. They’re also held by entities overseas, including certain banks in Japan that have gorged on these US CLOs. But that’s their problem.

One third of the CLOs in the US banking system are held by just one bank: JPMorgan Chase; and 80% of the CLOs in the US banking system are held by just three banks. But at each of these three gigantic banks, CLOs account for only 1.2% to 1.3% of total assets (total asset amounts per Federal Reserve Q1 2020):

JPMorgan Chase: $34.0 billion in CLOs = 1.3% of its $2.69 trillion in assets.
Wells Fargo: $24.6 billion in CLOs = 1.2% of its $1.76 trillion in assets.
Citigroup: $21.4 billion in CLOs = 1.3% of its $1.63 trillion in assets.

In 11th position down the list is the second largest bank in the US, Bank of America, with just $807 million in CLOs, accounting for barely over 0% of its $2.03 trillion in assets.

In other words, the largest four banks in the US hold $81 billion of the $99 billion of CLOs in the US banking system – but given the gargantuan size of their assets, this percentage-wise small CLO exposure is the least of their problems.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Business Uncertainty About Sales Goes Haywire

June 25, 2020

Business Uncertainty About Sales Goes Haywire

These Charts Show What Mess Businesses Face Going Forward.

I’m going to show you a chart based on data that the Atlanta Fed released today. We’ll dissect it in a moment. The chart would be funny, if it weren’t so serious. At first, just look at the chart superficially. These results are based on surveys of businesses of a wide variety of sizes, spread across all sectors of the economy (except agriculture and government), in all regions of the US. They’re asked about their own businesses, in terms of sales, employment, and capital investment over the next 12 months. And the chart also shows how uncertain the participants are about their own expectations.

So this is about expectations for their own businesses, and about the uncertainty of their own expectations. For now, just look at the chart without analyzing it: It shows better than just about anything else what mess businesses face going forward: Their world has gone haywire.

The pandemic has hit businesses differently. Some businesses have reported booms in demand because of the shifts cause by the lockdowns and other factors, and they have trouble keeping up. Other businesses are in a state of collapse or have filed for bankruptcy. And then there’s every business in between. And these results are the averages of the pandemic’s winners and losers combined.

Expectations of Growth and the Uncertainty of those Expectations.

There are two factors here in the Atlanta Fed/Chicago Booth/Stanford Survey of Business Uncertainty: These companies’ expectations; and their uncertainty about their own expectations.

Business expectations.

Expectations of sales growth over the next 12 months (red line in the chart below has been trending down since November 2018 (high of 128.5). This was later borne out by the slowing economy. Those expectations were already low before the pandemic hit in December 2019 (86.7), indicating a further slowdown of the economy for 2020, and remained roughly in that range in January and February.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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“We’re not even thinking about thinking about” slowing the decline of the dollar’s purchasing power — and thereby labor’s purchasing power.

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