This Week in Summary 8/12/2022

Aug 12, 2022 | Bubble Monitor, No Bull Economics

Great news! The inflation number came down from +9.1% to +8.5% so that means everything will be back to normal, well, pretty quickly. To be fair, many of the public restaurant chains are calling peak inflation with expectations for moderating costs during the back half of the year. Also, they are generally bullish about consumers making more than $75k/year. In any case, this is all investors needed to send stocks even higher with double-digit increases over the last month for the major US indexes. Granted, YTD results are still double-digit negative, so it is not like we are actually off to the races – that is unless you own Ethereum which is up over +80% for the month. With most companies done reporting 2Q22 results, S&P 500 earnings will be down -4% y/y for the quarter (excluding energy companies) but up +7% when including your friendly oil companies. Analysts expect full-year 2022 S&P 500 earnings growth of +2.4% excluding energy. Payroll numbers also looked strong even if there is good reason to believe that this is a function of a lot of people taking on more than one job to help pay for gas, food, and punishing rent hikes. Could be worst, all things considered. In conclusion, while it does appear that the economy and markets are beginning to stabilize, we still must see what the medium-term impact of the Fed’s aggressive interest rate hikes will have on consumers and, more importantly, the vital real estate market. Time will tell.

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Fixed-Income Issuance Says a Lot About Economy

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