What a difference a year makes: last December, just as the ECB was about to shock the market with the announcement of its first €20 billion QE tapering, macroeconomic data mattered, especially since the Fed's tightening intertia appeared to truly be data-dependent, if only for a very short period of time.
Legendary investor Jack Bogle is apparently not all that optimistic that public pension funds in the U.S. are going to be able to meet their future funding obligations. Speaking with Bloomberg earlier today, Bogle predicted that bond returns will be a paltry 3% over the next decade, with stock returns not that much better, making it almost impossible for pensions to meet their arbitrary 7.5%-8.0% return hurdles.
Following hopeful survey data and ADP data, today's Challenger, Gray, and Christmas job cuts data is deplorable. A 30.1% surge year-over-year is the worst November since 2012...
The sectors with the largest job cuts in November were Healthcare, Consumer products, and Services.
A day after labor unions warned that General Electric was planning thousands of job cuts in its troubled power-generation unit, GE confirmed that it’s planning to cut 12,000 jobs globally in its power business as the company’s new leadership tries to revive the company’s moribund stock price.
US labor productivity rose 3.0% QoQ in Q3, the biggest rise since Q3 2014.
Great news, right?
Not so much, as the rise in productivity comes at the expense of the wages of the American worker who saw unit labor costs (wages) decline 0.2% (against expectations of a 0.2% gain) - down for 2 straight quarters for the first time since 2014.
Real compensation declined 1.1% YoY - falling for the fourth straight quarter...