Lara Rhame
Lara Rhame
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We had a massive jump in the Conference Board measure of consumer sentiment last month, and everybody will be looking for confirmation of that improvement in the Michigan survey.
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If we get a downside surprise in retail sales, everybody will shrug it off. We all know that April was a bad month for the economy; the markets are really geared toward May.
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Everybody has to learn a little more economics than they want to learn, now that we're drawing more and more of a distinction between actual GDP and final domestic demand, which is GDP minus inventories. Inventories can surprise. It's hard to make a solid forecast about them, and the Fed said that. I think the market continues to overestimate Fed rate cuts.
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Everybody is spinning it in their own direction, ... The end result is the same trends remain in place: dollar weakness, euro strength and the yen strong, but not so strong as the euro.
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Everybody knows they (investors) want to buy high yielding currencies and the yen still seems like the best currency to sell to fund that.
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What the current deficit does is make the dollar vulnerable. It means we could see a vicious cycle, where a declining dollar makes U.S. assets less attractive to foreign investors, which weakens our assets further, which puts further pressure on the dollar.
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I see the trade gap stabilizing, but it's hard to see it narrowing unless you get the U.S. consumer shutting down.
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Europeans' cries are falling on deaf ears. Their wish that the euro not bear the burden of readjustment will not make it into the G7 statement.
bear burden cries deaf euro falling wish
Europeans' cries are falling on deaf ears, ... Their wish that the euro not bear the burden of readjustment will not make it into the G7 statement.
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Probably the easiest way to think about the Sept. 11 event is to think of bouncing a ball off the roof of a garage onto the driveway, ... The ball's bouncing around, and it's still unclear what the slope of the driveway is. But we can be fairly sure it's sloping up.
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People's outlook for the economy changes much faster than the underlying state of the economy. The Fed tries to keep its eye on the larger ball and not on the ping-pong ball of the stock market.
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As the economy gets more and more dependent on housing being the key driver of growth, the economy becomes more and more vulnerable to that sector slowing down.
tread
At this point, they have very little ammo left, and they will need to tread carefully.
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Consumers will keep us in positive territory, but they're not going to be optimistic enough to fuel economic growth to its potential.