Submitted by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,
Stop Blaming Consumers, They Can’t Help It
Since 2009, mainstream economists, the media, and the Fed have continued to prognosticate a resurgence of economic growth. Yet each year, as shown in the chart of Fed forecasts below, such predictions have repeatedly overstated reality.
One month ago, when we updated on the performance of Horseman Global, what until recently was the world's most bearish hedge fund with a record net short exposure of -98%...
... at least until Icahn Enterprises emerged with its even more gargantuan -149% net short...
... we cited fund CIO Russell Clark who observed the fund's dramatic -9.6% drop in the month of March, and made it clear that he wasn't going anywhere because he was confident that the move was nothing but a short squeeze, which - if anything - made Clark even more bearish.
After many prominent blow ups in the retail and consumer space in the past week, moments ago Nordstrom was the latest casualty of the US consumer's unwillingness to spend money when the company reported Q1 EPS of $0.26, missing consensus estimates of $0.46 by nearly half, and about a third of what the company earned last year despite relatively flat revenues of $3.25 billion which also missed expectations of $3.29 billion. Comparable sales dropped -1.7% on estimates of an unchanged print.
Seriously...
Stocks were mixed today -Trannies and Nasdaq tumbled, the S&P ended marginally red and Dow barely held green.. Stocks were saved in the pre-NYMEX ramp from crude...
While oil bulls were delighted by yesterday's DOE news of an inventory drawdown refuting the prior day's API news of a major build, what was ignored was the build in Cushing storage (more on that shortly), which according to Genscape hit a utilization just shy of 80%, or more than 70 million barrels, a record high since Genscape began monitoring the hub in 2009.