Category: zerohedge

Pending home sales plunged in August, dropping 1.8% MoM (almost four times worse than expected) to its lowest since Oct 2014 (and fell 2.5% YoY) – the fourth month of annual declines in a row…

As Bloomberg notes, the decline, which was broad-based across all four regions, shows that higher mortgage rates, rising prices and a shortage of affordable homes continue to squeeze buyers. Existing-home sales in August matched the lowest in more than two years, while revisions to new-home sales showed a slower market than thought, according to previously released figures.

NAR continues to blame low inventory and affordability

“Pending home sales continued a slow drip downward,” Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, said in a statement.

“The greatest decline occurred in the West region where prices have shot up significantly, which clearly indicates that affordability is hindering buyers and those affordability issues come from lack of inventory, particularly in moderate price points.”

On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, sales In The West collapse 9.9% YoY…

As a reminder, economists consider pending-home sales a leading indicator because they track contract signings; purchases of existing homes are tabulated when a deal closes, typically a month or two later

via RSS https://ift.tt/2Om1t4O Tyler Durden

While Democrats are planning to try and use Brett Kavanaugh’s high school yearbooks to suggest that he was a drunken sex fiend, Congressional GOP have reportedly obtained a copy of Christine Blasey Ford’s yearbook – which had been mysteriously scrubbed from the internet prior to her coming forward with sexual assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee. 

Unfortunately for Ford, this may not bode well for her credibility. Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations reports that a GOP committee staffer said “We have her yearbooks … She will not make a good witness.“

The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, noted that the annual class books feature a photo of an underage Ford attending at least one party, alongside a caption boasting of girls passing out from binge drinking. Her yearbooks also openly reference sexually promiscuous behavior by the girls, including targeting boys at Kavanaugh’s alma mater, Georgetown Prep, an all-boys school in the affluent Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. Ford attended neighboring Holton-Arms School, an all-girls academy. –RealClaearInvestigations

That said, while Ford’s yearbook could be an exhibit at the hearing, it could be risky for congressional GOP to use it against her. Congressional sources told Sperry “That’s a minefield, especially given the #MeToo movement.”

Evidence reportedly exists that Ford, a “popular cheerleader at the time, was immersed in an alcohol-fueled party culture and no stranger to “keg parties” in the D.C. area – or the “bar scene” along the Maryland and Delaware coast. 

Ford was known as a “party girl” on the Delaware shore during summer breaks, another source with direct knowledge of the congressional investigation said. 

…

classmates said the former cheerleader, who was known as “Chrissy,” was part of the underage drinking tradition that was no secret among Maryland prep schools in the early 1980s, when the drinking age was 18.

…

Her own school yearbooks (in which parents took out paid ads) celebrated “boys [and] beer” and pictured beer bottles and beer cans and scenes of boys and girls drinking at parties. One published a photo of Ford and other girls at a Halloween party alongside a caption boasting of “pass[ing] out” after playing “Quarters” and other binge-drinking games. Her father, Ralph Blasey, was president of the local country club.

…

One section, “While the Parents Were Out,” talked about partying with boys at area house parties where kids got so drunk they “ruined” their parents’ “heirloom Persian rugs” with vomit.

…

“The tenth grade taught us how to party,” the girls bragged in another section. And, “Loss of consciousness is often an integral part of the party scene.”

A caption on another page talked about girls having “their choice of men” at the neighboring boys schools, including Georgetown Prep: “No longer confining ourselves to the walls of Landon and Prep, we plunged into the waters of St. John and Gonzaga with much success.” –RealClaearInvestigations

In one case, Ford was involved in “a romantic triangle” at Dewey Beach resulting in two men getting into a fistfight over her. 

“She was not the wholesome Catholic girl they’re trying to portray her as,” said one source, who added that Blasey Ford (then just Blasey) was known by a sexually derogatory nickname playing off her maiden name, which suggests she was promiscuous. 

Ford and her attorney – and her adviser Ricki Seidman – a former Clinton and Obama White House official and Democratic operative who advised Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings, have argued that Kavanaugh and other boys from Georgetown Prep were in fact aggressively targeting Ford and other girls from her school while getting them drunk. Ford has specifically accused Kavanaugh of groping her in a room while Kavanaugh’s friend watched. 

She says she has suffered post-traumatic stress disorder from the alleged attack, which she says involved an inebriated Kavanaugh forcefully groping her on a bed over her clothes while clapping his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming for help. She added that she has had to seek therapy and other medical treatment to deal with “panic attacks” and “anxiety” from the incident, which she did not report to authorities. –RealClaearInvestigations

That said, two men have independently told the Judiciary Committee that Ford may be misremembering events, and that they in fact groped her. 

Unfortunately, Ford cannot provide much detail surrounding her claim thanks to a hazy memory; including the location of the house, the date of the party or how she got there. She does, interestingly, remember only consuming “one beer” at the event, and that she didn’t tell anyone about the alleged assault at the time – including her close girlfriend who she says was at the party. Her friend, however – and everyone else Ford says was at the party, have denied any recollection of it. 

Sperry notes that neither Ford’s parents nor her two siblings have come out in support of Ford, and they did not sign a family letter of support circulated by her husband. 

Jay Martin, a local who went to school in the area at the time, said that the Holton-Arms girls in the 1980s were hardly angels. 

“I am her age,” he said of Ford. “I went to high school next to Prep and knew lots of Holton-Arms girls. This is pure false memory syndrome.”

Added Martin: “One of my best women friends had Kavanaugh ask her out [and] she said he was ‘one of the nice ones.’ His mom was a judge. I mean, seriously?”

via RSS https://ift.tt/2OU8Rlc Tyler Durden

After a series of delays and countless hours of haggling and speculation, President Trump’s embattled SCOUTS nominee Brett Kavanaugh will face the first of what are now five accusers (two of them anonymous) who have alleged that he sexually attacked or assaulted them, or someone they know, in the distant past.

For the hearing, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford – who went public 11 days ago with allegations that Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, attempted to remove her clothes and covered her mouth when she tried to scream for help during a high school party 36 years ago – will travel to Room 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to answer questions from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as a female sex crimes prosecutor hired by committee Republicans. Kavanaugh, who has already sat for two days of confirmation hearings, will also attend the hearing, where he will answer questions about allegations of past sexual misconduct.

The hearing, which is slated to begin at 10 am ET, is expected to be a media circus that has already drawn comparisons to the confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas, who was nearly waylaid by accusations of sexual harassment from former law clerk Anita Hill back in the early 1990s. The hearing is expected to last several hours.

Watch the hearing live below:

We’ve published a guide to everything readers need to know about the hearing a piece explaining the potential repercussions that this hearing could have on the #MeToo movement and a story detailing some of the latest allegations against Kavanaugh.

* * *

Democrats will seek to paint Kavanaugh as scattered and anxious, while Republicans are hoping to discredit Ford by focusing on gaps in her memories. Already, all of the people who Ford claims were at the party have said they either weren’t there or that the incident never happened.

Another question that will be on viewers minds: What will Trump think of the hearing?

And will any more accusers step forward between now and the time the marathon session ends?

via RSS https://ift.tt/2OQQ7mE Tyler Durden

Cash US equity markets are open and that has prompted the now ubiquitous buying-panic in whatever has some momentum – Nasdaq in this case. The Dow is rolling lower and WTI is suddenly getting monkey-hammered…

 

Nasdaq has surged back above the pre-Powell-Plunge highs…

 

And as Nasdaq surges, WTI plunges, erasing the gains from earlier comments by the U.S. energy secretary, who ruled out the release of emergency crude reserves.

The Dollar Index is extending its Hawkish Fed gains…

via RSS https://ift.tt/2zzU9ux Tyler Durden

Authored by Kurt Schlichter via Townhall.com,

In the off-chance Christine Blasey Ford actually shows up and testifies – I give it under 50% – the wussy GOP senators on the Judiciary Committee are going to treat her with kid gloves, which is awful. No one making an accusation with such potentially catastrophic consequences for the accused (here, the accused may properly be called “the victim”) should escape harsh, penetrating cross-examination. This is particularly true when the Jenga tower that is her lunchmeat story is teetering on the edge of collapse.

But they will instruct their questioners to use kid gloves nonetheless, because they are terrified of being portrayed as big meanies for challenging her shaky story. Pathetic. As my new book Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy explains (and you must order it now because it comes out next Tuesday), this illustrates the disconnect between status-obsessed elites (including conservativish ones in the Senate) and Normal people who want to cut through the San Francisco sidewalk stuff.

Our GOP senators are more concerned with their reputations in the Beltway Bubble, while Normal people just want to get at the truth. And to get at it, their questioning would be very different than the kind of “We want to nurture and support you in this difficult time” garbage we’re likely to hear from people who should be shredding her flimsy fabric of lies.

Here are questions I’d ask if I were a senator doing the questioning, along with some anticipated colloquy with my distinguished colleagues.

1. Dr. Ford, you are a committed liberal, correct?

[“Senator Feinstein’s objection that my question undermines the witness’s credibility is noted and disregarded.”]

2. And it’s true that you wouldn’t want Future Justice Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court because of his conservative judicial philosophy regardless of the alleged incident?

3. Your lawyers are Democrat activists, right?

4. Are they working for free, or do you intend to pay them with the several hundred thousand dollars the various GoFundMe campaigns in your name have raised?

5. You traveled to Hawaii in your work and back east in August. So, when did that “fear of flying” we heard about start and stop?

[“Mr. Chairman, Senator Flake’s winking at the cameras of the liberal media outlets is distracting me. I know he needs a job, but let him suck up to MSNBC on his own time.”]

6. So, Dr. Ford, let’s get to the basics. Exactly what day and time did this incident happen?

7. Exactly where did this incident happen?

8. How many people were in the house at the time?

[“Mr. Chairman, I’ll pause my questioning to let Senator Hirono count the number on her fingers. While she’s trying to work it out, I’m hitting the head.”]

9. In 2012, your therapist wrote down that there were four people in the room. Why would she do that if you didn’t tell her that?

10. Do you find it odd that each person who you now say was present has stated that they have no idea what you are talking about?

11. If they might not remember because the party was nothing special, how often did you and your teen pals go to houses with a bunch of boys and get drunk?

12. You claim Future Justice Kavanaugh was drunk. How drunk were you?

13. As a psychologist, will you concede that alcohol inebriation will make a teenager’s memory unreliable? 

[“Senator Sasse, your Fredocon whining about how we’re better than this and how this is not who we are is noted. I’ll ask my questions however I damn well please.”]

14. You claim you thought Future Justice Kavanaugh was trying to rape you. If so, why didn’t he chase you and actually rape you?

15. You say you left the house without telling anyone. Doesn’t that seem like something odd that your female friend would remember?

16. If you thought Future Justice Kavanaugh was going to rape you, why would you leave your friend alone there with this alleged monster?

17. And you didn’t call the cops, right?

18. You didn’t tell your parents?

19. You didn’t even tell your friends?

20. But you happened to tell your therapist in 2012, right around the time Future Justice Kavanaugh’s name was being brought up as a Supreme Court candidate?

[“Mr. Chairman, can you have the withered commie crone dressed as a handmaid dragged out so I can continue?]

21. Future Justice Kavanaugh was a big deal in 2012, and you say you mentioned his name, but it’s not in your therapist’s notes. It’s not even in there that your attacker is now a well-known judge. Your therapist sure got a lot wrong, didn’t she?

22. Say, at any time, did Future Justice Kavanaugh suggest that you put some ice on that?

23. Did Future Justice Kavanaugh slap you around like a Democrat congressman from Minnesota?

24. Did Future Justice Kavanaugh drive hammered and leave you to drown in an Oldsmobile?

[“Mr. Chairman, let’s pause. Senator Sasse spilled the pearls he was clutching.”]

25. You say this event damaged you permanently, but you did not seek treatment before 2012 even though you are a psychologist, correct?

26. You wanted to remain anonymous, right?

[“Mr. Chairman, can you have the screeching B-movie actress dressed as a handmaid dragged out so I can continue?”]

27. You sent a letter to your congresswoman in July, right?

28. You hired a famous, leftist lawyer in D.C. in August, right?

29. You say you took a lie detector test in August, right?

30. But you contacted the Washington Post, but did you really think they would do anything about it before you gave them your name?

31. And you’re here voluntarily, not even under subpoena, right?

32. You never intended to remain anonymous, did you?

[“Mr. Chairman, can you have the beta male dressed as a handmaid dragged out so I can continue?”]

33. Are you aware that people are calling you “brave”?

34. Are you aware that people are calling you a “hero”?

35. And are you aware that Anita Hill has been celebrated as a brave liberal hero since the Justice Thomas hearings?

36. As a psychologist, you are aware that sometimes people say things that are not true to get attention, correct?

37. As a psychologist, you are aware that sometimes people enjoy the spotlight?

38. As a psychologist, isn’t it possible that someone might invent a claim of assault in order to get attention or achieve a political goal?

[“Mr. Chairman, I need to pause to let Senator Spartacus take a call from T-Bone.”]

39. As a psychologist, do you disagree with the consensus that sexual abusers repeat their crimes?

40. How do you account for the fact that not one single person, besides you, has claimed that Future Justice Kavanaugh has ever tackled someone and tried to rip off her clothes?

41. Sixty-five women signed a letter saying Future Justice Kavanaugh was always a perfect gentleman. Why would they all lie?

42. No one allegedly in the house for the alleged party corroborates your story. Why would they all lie?

43. For that matter, no one at the dorm corroborates that other leftist woman’s story either. Why would they all lie?

44. And, of course, no one corroborates Stripper Matlock’s story, right?

45. So, why are you lying?

This whole ridiculous charade illustrates the vital importance of cross-examination as the foundation of our justice system. Ford does not deserve special treatment. When the Democrats talk about “respect” and “victim blaming,” what they are seeking to do is put out-of-bound the kind of questions whose answers (or, more likely, non-answers and evasions) will demonstrate to the world what a crock her whole story is.

Normal people get that. Let’s see if our elite does.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2NMEtfW Tyler Durden

Family offices have been posting increasingly fantastic returns over the last couple years. In fact, according to a new report, family offices returned an average of 15.5% last year, which was up from 7% in 2016 and 0.3% in 2015. Family offices in Asia returned even more, averaging 16.4% in 2017 as dealmaking, real estate and markets roared.

The data is according to a survey put together by UBS and Campden Research, who has conducted the survey annually for the last 5 years. The survey is meant to shine a light on sometimes opaque family offices, which don’t always have the same regulatory reporting standards of many SEC registered hedge funds and corporations.

The prominence of family offices over the last few decades has picked up notably. For instance, billionaires like Microsoft’s Paul Allen and Google’s Sergey Brin both started their own family offices: Vulcan Capital and Bayshore Global Management, respectively. Brin’s firm reportedly has hired former bankers for financial matters – and former Navy SEALS for security. Another family office example is Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, who set up Hillspire. Schmidt’s firm is reported to have a 20% stake in hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co.

Just these offices alone combine to over more than $100 billion in assets.

And the rise in Asian wealth has helped fuel the start of overseas family offices over the last decade. UBS estimates that a new billionaire is created in China every two days and Asia is now home to a quarter of the people on Bloomberg‘s ranking of the world’s 500 richest people.

The UBS survey polled 311 family offices, 37% which originated after 2010. The average amount of assets held by each office was $808 million, and the average worth of the families polled was $1.1 billion. Just over 20% say they have two office sites, but some have up to five locations.

Sara Ferrari, UBS’s head of global family office, told Bloomberg: “This is still a very early trend, and it needs to be monitored. U.S. family offices with more than one branch tend to have the second one in the country, and it’s mostly the same with Europe. But family offices in the emerging markets and Asia tend to diversify more regionally.”

Worldwide, there are estimated to be over 5,000 family offices, according to Campden Research. 75% of those who participated in the latest survey are managing wealth on behalf of just a single family. Family offices also don’t have any problem taking on more illiquid assets in order to boost returns. According to the survey, these offices may take a more hands-on approach to private investments, reflective of a global trend toward this type of riskier dealmaking. For instance, we just reported on the rise of another type of high risk dealmaking taking place in leveraged loans.

Direct private equity made up about 14% of family office portfolios, reported to be twice the level of fund allocations.

According to UBS, if you have over $150 million, you are a “ideal candidate” to set up a family office. At the end of 2017, UBS itself managed the equivalent of $125 billion through its family office program.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2zyS2Xy Tyler Durden

Authored by Alexandra Desanctis via NationalReview.com,

These are salacious claims launched without verification and wielded by those with no interest in the truth…

It’s been nearly a year since Ronan Farrow torpedoed the career of Harvey Weinstein, printing in The New Yorker a series of credible accusations that the Hollywood producer had sexually abused several women. His piece touched off a firestorm that led to purges of incredibly powerful men in a variety of industries, finally forcing them to face consequences for their sexual misconduct.

Sunday night, though, Farrow and his colleague Jane Mayer did a huge disservice to the Me Too movement by publishing an incredibly thin sexual-abuse allegation against Brett Kavanaugh. That story, a prime example of how some media outlets and left-wing voices have mishandled the accusations against the judge, will likely create a climate in which fewer victims are believed, more innocent men suffer for crimes they didn’t commit, and neutral observers are more inclined to doubt claims of sexual assault.

The political circus overwhelming the Kavanaugh confirmation will almost certainly weaken the Me Too movement in the long run by undermining its promise that the truth matters and that it will enable us to obtain justice.

The slapdash nature of Sunday’s reporting by Farrow and Mayer encourages readers to cast doubt on this newest accusation. They write of Kavanaugh’s accuser, Deborah Ramirez: “In her initial conversations with The New Yorker, she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty,” saying she was only willing to go on the record “after six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney,” at which point “she felt confident enough of her recollections.” Their effort to publish this story should’ve stopped right there.

What’s more, they couldn’t find a single eyewitness to confirm that Kavanaugh was present at the party Ramirez describes, or even to confirm they heard this account from the accuser herself. One friend of Ramirez’s told The New Yorker: “This is a woman I was best friends with. We shared intimate details of our lives. And I was never told this story by her, or by anyone else. It never came up. I didn’t see it; I never heard of it happening.”

The only corroboration Farrow and Mayer offer is one hearsay account from someone who says he was told that Kavanaugh did this. We are given no indication from whom this man heard it; for all we know, it could’ve been a tale passed along in a lengthy game of telephone. The New York Times noted on Sunday that its reporters had been aware of the story as well, but had “interviewed several dozen people” and could find no one with firsthand knowledge of Ramirez’s story.

The incident Ramirez describes may have happened, but surely no one can be blamed for reading the New Yorker piece and concluding that it didn’t. If Farrow and Mayer believed Ramirez’s story, they shouldn’t have published it without substantive corroboration in a piece that encourages neutral viewers to doubt women who claim to be victims.

Attorney Michael Avenatti’s claims of new allegations against Kavanaugh, meanwhile, are almost sure to have a similarly damaging effect. If his salacious stories prove false, his decision to peddle them could singlehandedly destroy the Me Too movement. Even if the claims are true, or partly so, he is quite obviously using allegations of severe sexual abuse as a teaser-trailer for his potential 2020 Democratic presidential run, stirring up the kind of political feeding frenzy in which victims often will be disbelieved.

The way that California senator Dianne Feinstein handled Christine Blasey Ford’s letter accusing Kavanaugh of attempted rape also indicates a lack of seriousness on the left: If Feinstein really believed the story, she did Ford a disservice by holding on to it until the last minute. If she cared about achieving justice for a potential victim, she should’ve encouraged Ford to allow her to address the accusation during the confirmation hearing, and she should’ve shared the letter with the full committee. Ford did ask for confidentiality, but she clearly wanted her story to bear on Kavanaugh’s confirmation in some way. If she was willing to share her story at all, she had to be willing to let the resulting process unfold fairly, which included letting the committee investigate her claim and letting Kavanaugh respond to it — even if her name was never attached to it.

Though we don’t know who leaked Ford’s story to the press, it seems most likely that someone on the left deliberately waited until the last possible moment to let it trickle out, in an eleventh-hour effort to tank Kavanaugh. That choice created an atmosphere in which it’d be much less likely that the public would take Ford seriously, hardly what those who care about victims would want.

Meanwhile, Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono has advanced the extremely dangerous notion that it doesn’t matter whether Kavanaugh committed misconduct or not. Last week, she insisted that “not only do women like Dr. Ford . . . need to be heard, but they need to be believed” and that all men need to “just shut up and step up.” And when CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Hirono Sunday whether Kavanaugh has “the same presumption of innocence as anyone else in America,” the Democratic senator replied, “I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases.”

With this answer, Hirono – who casts herself as one of our government’s foremost opponents of sexual abuse – dealt a significant blow to the seriousness of the Me Too movement. If it doesn’t actually matter whether alleged abusers actually abused anyone, and it’s just a question of partisanship, why should Americans listen to the stories of victims at all? Just decide whether or not you like the politics of the person being accused, and that’s that.

The idea that we must “believe all women” is similarly reckless, and left-wing activists and abortion-rights groups are pushing it nearly nonstop. Far from being a way to support women, this argument means that the truth of an allegation matters not at all, a terrible development for real victims of assault — not to mention for men falsely accused.

All of this will add up to the average person, who naturally wants justice for survivors, being less inclined to take sexual-abuse allegations seriously, the exact opposite of what the Me Too movement has promised and until now largely delivered. Because these accusations against Kavanaugh have so clearly been weaponized as a partisan tool, it only makes sense that onlookers will dismiss stories presented by biased politicians or shoddy reporting.

When people become numb to outrageous claims launched without verification and wielded by those with no interest in the truth, they will close their eyes to real instances of abuse. This debacle is teaching onlookers to take the stories of victims with a grain of salt. How can the average person be expected to care about seeking justice when so many in the public square seem to care more about advancing an agenda than about discerning who has actually been mistreated or abused?

The Me Too movement has gained immense influence over the last year precisely because it has encouraged us to acknowledge the reality of sexual abuse and follow the truth wherever it leads. Now, the question of whether the accusations against Kavanaugh are true has been subjugated to a political endgame. That promises to destroy the cultural power of the Me Too movement.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2OV68rJ Tyler Durden

Do not show this to President Trump, he will not be happy…

In the few months since President Trump unleashed his trade war, predicated on managing back America’s massive merchandise trade deficit, things have gone very wrong, judging by the numbers.

Against expectations of a $70.6 billion deficit, August’s goods trade balance plunged to $75.8 billion – just shy of July 2008’s record high deficit of $76.025 billion…

Whether this reflects pre-emptive actions ahead of actual tariffs is unclear:

• Exports fell 1.6% in Aug. to $137.912b from $140.199b in the prior month

• Imports rose 0.7% to $213.742b in Aug. from $212.246b in July

With exports of food and beverage and Industrial supplies plunging in August (and consumer goods surging).

Imports were dominated by a 3.2% increase in Automotives.

 

 

via RSS https://ift.tt/2Og3KhT Tyler Durden

After bursting higher in second quarter, when according to the first estimate of Q2 GDP, the US economy grew at an annualized 4.1% rate, a number which rose to 4.2% in the second estimate in August, moments ago the BEA reported that according to its final estimate of second quarter GDP, US growth remained unchanged at a 4.2% annualized rate, or technically 4.15% – in line with consensus and still the highest since the summer of 2016 – at a time when the Trump’s $1.5 trillion fiscal stimulus was boosting the US economy.

While overall GDP growth was unrevised from the second estimate, there were small revisions in the subcomponents, reflecting upward revisions in most categories, which were offset by a downward revision to inventory investment.

After last month’s modest drop in Personal Consumption (from 4.0% initially reported to 3.8%), in the final revision, this number remained unchanged at 3.8%, and in line with expectations.

In terms of contribution to the bottom line, the various line items were as follows:

• Personal Consumption: 2.57%, up from 2.55%
• Fixed Investment:1.10%, up from 1.07%
• Change in Private Inventories: -1.17%, down from -1.07%
• Exports: 1.12%, up from 1.10%
• Imports: 0.10%, up from 0.07%
• Government consumption: 0.43%, up from 0.41%

A big contributor to growth was nonresidential fixed investment, or spending on equipment, structures and intellectual property rose 8.7% in 2Q after rising 11.5% prior quarter

Separately, the GDP price index rose 3.0% in 2Q after rising 2.0% prior quarter, while core PCE q/q surprised modestly by rising 2.1% in 2Q after the prior report showed a 2.0% increase.

Also in today’s report, the BEA said that corporate profits rose 1.2% in prior quarter; y/y corporate profits were revised somewhat lower up 7.3% in 2Q after rising 5.9% prior quarter, and were broken down as follows:

• Financial industry profits increased 3.7% Q/q in 2Q after falling 2.1% prior quarter
• Federal Reserve bank profits down 4.7% in 2Q after falling 2.8% prior quarter
• Nonfinancial sector profits rose 4.2% Q/q in 2Q after rising 2.7% prior quarter, and a notable downward revision from the 5.1% print in the last estimate.

Finally, while the number is largely irrelevant, as it references a period nearly 4 months old, it confirms that the economy was heating up headed into the summer. The bigger question of what GDP will do this quarter will be answered in one month, however according to high frequency economic indicators and the latest FOMC projections, all signs point to a continuation of the trend, especially since the impact of Trump’s fiscal boost is expected to peak some time around now.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2OV2wWq Tyler Durden

After a surprise tumble in July, preliminary August Durable Goods Orders were expected to rebound aggressively and rebound they did – jumping 4.5% MoM (+2.0%exp), the biggest jump since Feb ’18.

 

However, scratch below the surface and things are not nearly as positive as the headline suggests.

Durable Goods Ex Transportation rose just 0.1% MoM in August, the weakest growth since January…

Well below the 0.4% expected jump.

However, it gets worse, as Capital Goods Orders Non-Defense, Ex Aircraft – the main proxy for business spending – tumbled 0.5%

Tow more notable aspects – car production dropped but war spending surged again…

• Bookings for motor vehicles and parts fell 1 percent; communications equipment up 0.7 percent, computers and related products down 0.8 percent.

• Defense capital-goods orders jumped 44.4 percent, most since February.

Thank goodness we are at war in so many places!!

 

 

 

 

 

via RSS https://ift.tt/2xG8VhV Tyler Durden