Growth peaked on a quarter over quarter seasonally adjusted annual rate in Q3 last year at 4.9%. The preferred reading is on an annual basis where growth peaked in Q4 of last year at 3.13%. Growth in Q1 was 2.88% and growth in Q2 has risen some and is trending at right about 3%. 

Outside of the pandemic defined as 2020 and 2021, this past quarter was the 5th best quarter for nominal GDP in the last 25 years.

Tis was a poor number. The headline dropped from -5.9 to -10.5. The more eye popping number was the Index for New Orders which dropped from 1.3 to -25.6.

Banks continue to tighten lending standards across all sectors. This has eased a bit from the July survey. Banks continue to widen spreads across all sectors. The percentage of banks widening spreads has also eased a tad.

Wall street cheered the fact that we added fewer jobs (150,000) than expected (179,000) in October. This was a welcome relief after the hot September number that was revised down from 336,000 to 279,000.

We had a bad 1st quarter relative to historic averages for job cuts. But the situation has gotten better throughout the year. In the 3rd quarter of 2023 less people are losing their job relative to the average 3rd quarter going back to 1989.

This was a slight downward revision. Nothing to cheer and really nothing to write home about.
September Durable Goods were revised down .1% MoM in Sept and .05% MoM in Aug.

The most anticipated release of the week came in … “Unchanged” or sticky stuck from the August at 3.7% yoy. But it’s worth mentioning as we will discuss below that this is up from June CPI which was 3.09% yoy. Core CPI which excludes food and energy because of their volatility sits at 4.13% yoy down from 4.39% last month.

Let’s look under the hood a bit because headlines will mention “sticky” CPI and there are some reasons that CPI will indeed be stickier for longer than we hope.
Let’s first start with energy which is about 7.5% of the basket. With the exception of the spike in oil coinciding with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, oil peaked in June 22 at around $122/bbl. So for the whole year of June22-June23 oil was helping bring inflation down. In June22 energy inflation was 41.25% yoy

Pandemic Wealth Effect. The top 1% of the US made about $14T or $4.2M per person. The next 19% made about $20T or $318,000 per person. The next 30% made about $5T or $50,000 per person. The bottom 50% made about $1T or $6,000 per person. The resulting inflation is at a 40yr high and Powell wants the money back.

The lagged effect of inflation.
“Just call me Ishmael,” Jay.