Monday Macro – Macro Tour of the US economy in 16 charts
Highlights for the US economy from the Daily Shot in 16 pictures. No projections or estimates, just hard survey data
This week I want to try something slightly different. Like many market observers, I get the fantastic daily macro roundup from Lev Borodovsky called the Daily Shot. Look at it as a one-stop macro research service - I‘d highly recommend a subscription though it is not cheap!
The hitch though with the Daily Shot is that it comes with lots and lots and lots of charts and sometimes it’s a bit difficult to tune out the noise from the signal, especially as the data points can frequently be contradictory.
On a monthly basis, I’m planning to highlight 20 charts from that previous month which I think give investors a clear signal or two. There are some caveats that come with this curation.
The first is that most of the data is based on the US market. That’s largely because the US has such a wide variety of deeply researched surveys but also more importantly, because the US matters much more for UK investors than any other country except our own. And what starts in the US usually comes to the UK at some point—case-in-point interest rates. We may think that the Bank of England has total control over rates setting but in reality, the UK is influenced by decisions made in the US. If the US Federal Reserve kept raising rates, we‘d have a tough time fighting that drift.
The other caveat is I will try and keep a focus on actual hard data points not over-rely on forecasts. There’s nothing wrong with the latter (forecasts), it’s just that in my experience too many analysts are by nature cautious and cynical. This produces a pessimism bias that has been increasingly obvious this year. I, like many cynics, have been expecting a recession to arrive pretty much all through the course of 2023, and I, like all cynics, have been consistently wrong. It hasn’t arrived yet and may not even arrive at all. In that spirit, let's try and stay focused on the hard data most of the time.
So, with those caveats out of the way, to business. This week we’ll start with purely US numbers – I’ll run through UK charts next week.
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