Friday, July 31, 2009

Why so positive about the economic numbers?


It seems that the optimists found good even with the economic numbers today. GDP was revised down in the first quarter by -6.4%. Much worse than the -5.5% posted before. The second quarter was down only 1% instead f the expected 1.5%. The thought is that there is momentum in GDP after a bad first quarter. However if you look a personal consumption we were down -1.2% over double what was expected. This is going to be the driver for a strong recovery. Chicago PMI was up sightly but not like some of the big moves in other countries. The NAPM Milwaukee was down below 50 to 45.

The numbers suggest that the US is in slow growth even with all of the stimulus. This is reflected in the relative performance of the US stock market against equities in other countries. US is a laggard versus emerging markets and similar to Europe for large cap stocks.

The dollar was weaker based on new risk taking. We continue to move back and forth between risk seeking and risk avoidance in currency trading.

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