New home sales in August totaled 609k annualized, slightly above the forecast of 600k and July was revised up by 5k to 659k, the best in this recovery. The biggest volatility was seen down South. After an almost 60k home spike in the South in July, they fell back by almost 50k. Overall months’ supply was 4.6, up from 4.2 in July but vs 5.0 in June. The median home …
9/23 – Succinct Summation of the Week’s Events
Positives: Initial jobless claims fell 8k to 252k which was 9k less than expected. The 4 week average fell to 259k from 261k and that is an eight week low. Continuing claims, delayed by a week, fell by 36k to the lowest since May. Builder confidence jumped 6 pts in September to 65 which matches the best level since October 2005 (although of course the level of …
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Japan, FOMC, Existing Home Sales
With the continued belief that the tone of the global sovereign bond market changed over the past few months when Japan implicitly (and now explicitly) acknowledged that destroying the profitability of one’s banking system in an attempt to achieve 2% inflation is a bad trade off, I want to add a few more thoughts to what the BOJ announced yesterday. By pegging the …
And the Fed Says…
There of course was no rate hike but the drum roll begins for one "coming soon" (if the data confirms, blah, blah, blah) because not only did Esther George and Eric Rosengren dissent (for the 1st time and follows his recent comments), Loretta Mester casted a vote for a hike as well. In the commentary on the economy, the wording was pretty similar to the July …
“Yield curve control” but can they?
As hinted at over the past few months, the BoJ tweaked its monetary program to include “yield curve control.” They will do this by essentially setting the level of interest rates they want to target with the goal on the 10 yr yield in particular at around zero percent. They didn’t tell us however where they want the rest of the curve at. They chose not to go further …
If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else
If you don't know where you're going, you might wind up someplace else. The Yogi Berra quote on my Bloomberg terminal this morning seemed perfect ahead of the BoJ and Fed meetings this week. Who knows if he ever actually said it but it seems to highlight well the state of monetary policy that is based on nothing we can figure out. It certainly begs for central …
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Homebuilder Sentiment, Capital Flow, FOMC and more…
Builder confidence jumped 6 pts in September to 65 which matches the best level since October 2005 (this, as other diffusion indexes do, measures the direction of change, not the degree as obviously activity today is not what it was in 2005). Present conditions also rose 6 pts to 71 and the Future outlook also printed 71, up 5 pts from August. Prospective Buyers …
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9/16 – Succinct Summation of the Week’s Events
Positives: Initial jobless claims totaled 260k, little changed with the 259k seen last week and was 5k below the estimate. The 4 week average was little changed at 261k. Continuing claims, delayed by a week, were also little changed. The September Philly manufacturing index rebounded to +12.8 from +2.0 and vs the estimate of +1.0. The internals were mixed with …
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Hot Potato NIRP, Retail Sales, Jobless Claims and more…
Retail sales in August were disappointing. Sales ex volatile auto’s and gasoline fell .1% for a 2nd straight month and that was below the estimate of up .3%. If you also take out building materials to get to the so called ‘control group’, core sales also fell by .1%, well below the estimate of up .4% and July was revised down by .1%. As for auto sales, they fell by …
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Buy the Dip?, BoJ, UK, Purchase Applications and more…
The two way market that has been established again over the past week resulted in a 3.5 point drop in the weekly II data for Bulls. Interestingly, no one got more bearish as Bears dropped by .1 pts to 22.6. Thus all of the Bulls went to the Correction side as it rose to 28.4 from 24.7 last week. Again, these are people who expect a correction but want to buy it. The …
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Peter is the Chief Investment Officer at Bleakley Advisory Group and is a CNBC contributor. Each day The Boock Report provides summaries and commentary on the macro data and news that matter, with analysis of what it all means and how it fits together.