Business

With WTI heading for its best week since 2016, demand and inventory data is trumping production for now and today's Baker Hughes rig count data did nothing to change that as, following last week's 1 rig drop, producers only added 2 oil rigs in the last week to 766.

• *U.S. GAS RIG COUNT UP 6 TO 192 , BAKER HUGHES SAYS :BHGE US
• *U.S. OIL RIG COUNT UP 2 TO 766 , BAKER HUGHES SAYS :BHGE US

Judging by the lagged correlation to WTI, rig counts are stalling as expected...

The last two times Americans were saving this little in order to maintain their lifetsyles, the US economy was in recession.

According to newly revised government data, Bloomberg reports that American households scaled back their pace of savings to the lowest level in nine years at the end of 2016 as the growth of their wages and salaries slowed.

Via Dana Lyons Tumblr,

Stocks have recently witnessed an unprecedented cluster of new highs occurring on negative volume.

Despite a rebound in business survey hope, a number of consumer confidence measures have been tracking lower in recent months as Trumphoria fades. July's final UMich consumer confidence data confirms this trend printing at 93.4 - the lowest since Oct 2016. While current conditions rose to the highest since July 2005, the biggest driver of the overall decline was a tumble in the 'expectations' index.

Although a slight improvement on the early month preliminary print, the trend remains lower...

Remember when in January of 2015, after a bout of heavy snowfall and cold weather across, everyone was certain that Q1 GDP would be a disaster? If not, here is a reminder from the WSJ: