Succinct Summations for the week ending March 20th:
Positives:
1. The S&P 500 had its first positive week since mid-February
2. The UK FTSE crossed 7,000 for the first time ever
3. Building permits rose 3% vs an expected rise of 0.5%.
4. The Fed removed “patient” and US stocks rose 1.2%
5. The S&P 500 closed up 0.98%, its strongest Friday since January 16th.
6. NASDAQ had its first weekly close above 5000 since 2000.
Negatives:
1. Housing starts fell 17% to an annualized pace of 987k vs expectations for a 2.4% fall and 1.04mm homes.
2. Empire State factory index came in at 6.9, vs expectations of 8 and down from 7.8 previously.
3. The Philly Fed index came in at 5.0 vs expectations of 7.
4. The ten-year yield is back below 2%
5. Mortgage applications fell 2% w/o/w. Refi applications fell 5%.
6. Industrial production rose 0.1% m/o/m vs expectations of a 0.3% rise.
I realized today that the DAX is now up almost 50% from it’s mid-October lows. I can’t recall a time where a major stock market spiked so rapidly. It’s all the more amazing because, IIRC, German earnings have declined year over year and are forecast to go nowhere fast going forward.
Got to love these improving fundamentals (read: central bank asset price fixing).
A long time since I commented…not really sure where to put this…so this looks like a fine place.
Been frustrated with the “Millennial” narrative lately…that Goldman infographic a week or two ago as an example. The worst in that particular piece was “…giving them a set of priorities and expectations sharply different from previous generations.”
What a bunch of bs.
What the “Millennial” generation is or isn’t doing is based on “pace”. Their milestone purchases are on a longer arc. Simple as that. The sharing? That’s not that they don’t want to own stuff, they will, they are just better informed (and probably saddled with a sh*t ton of debt) and realize that in some cases the cost is reduced by sharing. Yes, they are the first to grow up in the information age and they are using that info to make better decisions.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/think-millennials-prefer-the-city-think-again/
I’m a Gen X – we were supposed to be unmotivated slackers that had no interest in career or country; we just wanted to brood in our flannel, listen to screaming grunge and play video games.
What is it that BR says? Something to the effect of folks that try to predict the future behavior of markets are really just self promoting? I think the same thing goes for trying to predict generational behavior.
Thank you, good night. :)
Wexler is right I think. The elephant in the room for millennial as well as gen x and y is they economic policy decisions were made in the late 1970s and in the 80s that were designed to reduce inflation by crushing worker wage increases. The PR program was so successful among the poors and soon to be poor’s and so popular among the already wealthy that it became a winner for both parties.