Mark Kiesel probably isn't the first name that springs to mind when Pimco's investment strategies are being discussed. That honor, ironically, still resides with Bill Gross even though he departed the firm for Janus over 3 years ago.
Having hiked in June amid gravely disappointing macro-economic data, all eyes are now on the minutes for inflation (weakness blamed on "idiosyncratic factors"), labor market (concerns about "sustained employment undershoot"), balance sheet normalization (Fed "divided" over when to start), and market valuation concerns ("equity market high on standard metrics"). Rate hike odds for Sept (22%) and Dec (56%) were rising into the release.
Additional headlines...
O'Reilly Automotive stock crashed as much as 21% on 7 times its average daily volume, its biggest drop since June 2012 dragging the share price to the lowest since October 2014, after the auto-parts retailer said same-store sales misses forecast for the second quarter.
The miss slammed ORLY peers: Advance Auto Parts plunged 16%, AutoZone tumbled 10%, while suppliers Standard Motor Products, Dorman Products and Motorcar Parts of America also dropped sharpdly.
Perhaps the single most accurate predictor of the economy has rolled over into recession territory.
We're talking about tax revenues.
GDP growth, unemployment data, ISM surveys… all of these can and are massaged by statisticians to create a rosier picture of the economy than reality. By way of example, we recently noted that 95% of all net job growth since 2008 was in fact created via an accounting gimmick. In reality, the jobs were never created at all.
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
Speaking in London, Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen Tuesday predicted that the “the system is much safer and much sounder” and explained that the Federal Reserve is prepared to deal with numerous enormous shocks to the economy.
In her conversation with Lord Nicholas Stern, Yellen also went on to list the reasons that, thanks to central bank intervention, there is unlikely to be another financial crisis “in our lifetimes.”