Here’s a nice alternative indicator from our friend Martin over at Macronomics.  He provides us with Nomura’s air cargo indicator and some more color on the current reading: A regular economic activity and deflationary indicator we have been tracking has been Air Cargo. It is according to Nomura a leading indicator of chemical volume growth and economic activity: “Over the [...]

The euro area provided its first estimate of Q1. The 0.2% decline in GDP comes after a 0.6% contraction in Q4 and confirms the euro area as the weakest among the high income regions. It is the sixth consecutive quarterly contraction, a record of dubious distinction.

Just throwing this chart out there for everyone to chew on.  Look at lumber prices relative to the homebuilders stock index.  Talk about a divergence!

It’s no secret that the equity market feels invincible right now.  How invincible though?  How about this.  We’ve now gone 177 days without a 5% correction.  That’s a new record for the current bull market.  Chart via LPL Financial and Business Insider:

Rail traffic trends have been undoubtedly weak in recent weeks as we’ve seen double digit year over year growth slide into negative territory.  This brought our 12 week moving average from a high of 6.75% in March to the low single digits. The latest intermodal traffic data from AAR showed 2.8% growth which is an improvement from last week’s 1.6% [...]

Analysts’ latest adjustments to corporate earnings forecasts for Japanese firms show many more upward than downward revisions. Merrill Lynch tracks the “number of stocks for which consensus EPS estimate has risen vs. the number for which it has fallen” over a 3-month period. That ratio (chart below) has spiked relative to other nations.

Disaggregation of credit is the understanding that there are good forms of credit and bad forms of credit.  A good form of credit is something like a standard business loan in which a company obtains access to a line of credit in order to make investments in the firm.  It pays employees, invests in equipment, etc.  This form of credit, [...]

In case you haven’t been paying attention, the Japanese stock market is on an epic run.  The Nikkei 225 is up 60% since last November when government officials began hinting at big policy changes that have since come to be known as “Abenomics”.  Abenomics is essentially a strategy where the government will throw everything including the kitchen sink at the [...]

Foreign investors own a little less than 6% of all US assets and a little less than half of this is accounted for by Chinese investors. This includes the central bank’s holdings of US Treasuries.