Business

Two weeks after we reported that the consumer credit card default rate as tracked by S&P/Experian Bankcard had surged to the highest level since June 2013...

... we were looking forward to the latest Fed Senior Loan officer survey for more details about changing loan dynamics within US society.

What the report revealed was troubling: while on the surface, the Loan Officer Survey characterized loans to businesses as "basically unchanged" from the previous survey, it did remark that standards for commercial real estate (CRE) loans had tightened.

The market is rising… or is it?

The number of individual S&P 500 companies above their 200-day moving averages (200-DMA) has rolled over.

Put simply, the broader market is NOT confirming this move in stocks.

So overall the momentum is leaving the market... but still the stock market index is going higher...

Why is this?

Because the market is being propped up by just a handful of Tech Companies.

Those companies are: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet.

Authored by Catherine Mann and Dan Andrews, originally posted op-ed via Bloomberg.com,

When lagging firms don't go bust, they hog scarce resources and drag down productivity.

The global economy is picking up steam, but that’s deceptive. The foundations of expansion are soft, marked by weak productivity growth and inequality. The two are related.

Tracking the disappointing, and downward revised March jobs report, when as a reminder the US added only 79,000 jobs, today's JOLTS report showed a decidedly more benign labor market in the month of March, with good news on the job openings front, offset by another month of hiring weakness.

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The Powers That Be are perfectly fine with your transition to proletarian debt-serf.

Yesterday we covered the usual suspects in the decline of the middle class as a financial-political bulwark against oligarchy / dominance of rentier elites: globalization, automation and the asymmetric distribution of rewards favoring the few over the many.