Ian Shepherdson
Ian Shepherdson
Ian Shepherdson is an award-winning British economist. He is the founder and Chief Economist of Pantheon Macroeconomics, an economic research firm located in Newcastle, England, with an office in White Plains, New York. In February 2015, he was named The Wall Street Journal's US economic forecaster of the year for the second time, having previously won the award in 2003...
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We expect further gains over the next couple of months in the wake of the plunge in gasoline prices. If we're right, the data will signal first quarter consumption growth of the order of 4 percent.
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These data leave confidence very close to its cycle high, and completely unaffected by higher interest rates. Together with the rise in home sales also reported today, the data sit very uneasily with Mr. Greenspan's dovish tone last week and again today.
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(These data are) bad news for (corporate profit) margins or future inflation -- or both,
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These data again show that when people have substantial net assets, slower income growth need not kill spending,
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The statement leaves room for inaction in November if the data fail to thrive.
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The revisions are not as big as we feared, ... The new April number shows sales at their lowest level since November, but the previous four months were exceptionally strong, in part due to favorable weather. Given the strong trend in mortgage applications, these data likely do not signal real housing weakness.
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We think Mr. Greenspan is willing to give the data a chance; it will take bad data to force an August rate hike,
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One steep drop in housing starts does not make a downward trend, especially in a month which was very wet in the West and very cold in the Northeast. Still, the data are consistent with other signs of a softening housing market, most notably the drop in homebuilders' confidence. What really matters, though, is whether sales will fall fast enough to turn a softening into a collapse.
data relief supports
We think the relief is temporary; no other data supports the slowdown story,
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We think there is a good chance that home sales recover, or at worst stabilize, over the next few months. The starts data are potentially seriously misleading.
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We have no real idea what the number next week will be, but we can be pretty sure that for the next few weeks the data will tell us next to nothing about the state of the economy across the country outside the areas hit by the storm.
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The data suggest real consumers' spending rose marginally last month -- but we still expect only a 1.5 percent annualized increase in the fourth quarter,
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The data confirm that the labor market is still not generating the sort of cost pressures many analysts expected with 4 percent unemployment.
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The bottom line here is that the month-to-month volatility in the durable orders data is such that the true information content in a single report is very small -- there's just too much noise.