M Notes: Mon, 6-23

LAST WEEK:  

Markets:  They basically treaded water last week.   

S&P roller coaster last week:  Up a lot, Down a lot, Down a touch, Holiday, and Down.

Fed Balance Sheet:  $6.681 Trillion.  

Fed Meeting:  No change in their rate.  But what caught my interest was a statement from Fed Chair Jerome Powell.  He said the Federal Reserve was forward looking.   Perhaps.  But normally the Fed isn’t proactive, its reactive.  Case in point:  they are waiting to see how Tariffs and what’s happening in the Middle East flushes out… before… they do anything.  “Because the economy is still solid, we can take the time to actually see what’s going to happen.”  Another quote:  “We’ll make smarter and better decisions if we just wait a couple of months or however long it takes to get a sense of really what is going to be the passthrough of inflation, and the effects on spending, and hiring, and all those things.”  Reactive (not proactive).  

Holiday:  US Markets were closed on Thursday, in observance of the June Nineteenth Federal holiday.  

Housing:  Starts were down -9.8% in May, and were down -4.6% Y/Y.  

Industrial production:  It was flat in April, and down -0.2% in May.  

Jobless claims:  The weekly number came in at 245,000.  The four-week average came in at 245,000.

National Debt:  $37.014 Trillion.  (It’s going up about $28-30 Billion/week.)

Retail sales:  Coming off of the April number of +0.1%,  May retail sales were down -0.9%; but were up +3.3% Y/Y.   

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THIS WEEK:

Focus of the week:  Inflation.   There are three primary Inflation metrics we watch.  The CPI, the PPI, and the PCE.  The PCE (Personal Consumption & Expenditures) index is the Inflation metric the Federal Reserve watches the most.  The May PCE is expected to rise from +2.1% up to +2.3% Y/Y.  The number comes out Friday morning.  

Calendar:  Existing home sales (Mon); new home sales (Wed) durable goods orders, the final Q1 GDP number, the preliminary trade deficit for May, jobless claims (Thu); and the PCE (Fri).

* The Standard & Poor's 500 (S&P 500) is an unmanaged group of securities considered to be representative of the stock market in general.    The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a price-weighted index of 30 actively traded blue-chip stocks.  The NASDAQ Composite Index is an unmanaged, market-weighted index of all over-the-counter common stocks traded on the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation System.  Yahoo! Finance, the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily and Barron’s are several of the sources used for financial information. 

* The National Debt figure comes from usdebtclock.org.   

* Opinions expressed are subject to change without notice and are not intended as investment advice or to predict future performance.  Consult your financial professional before making any investment decision.  You cannot invest directly in an index.   Past performance does not guarantee future results. No strategy can assure a profit or protect against a loss.  Investments in the securities markets involve risk, such as loss of your principal.