2007-12-18 US Economic Releases

2007-12-18 Housing Starts

Housing Starts (Nov)

Survey 1176K
Actual 1187K
Prior 1229K
Revised 1232K

2007-12-18 Building Permits

Building Permits (Nov)

Survey 1150K
Actual 1152K
Prior 1178K
Revised 1170K

While housing is still down and out, I’m going out on a limb and saying it’s not going to get much worse, and the next meaningful move is up, particularly if exports hold up. December, January, and February are slow months, and the data doesn’t tell me much; so, it will be ninety days before we get any clarity of where it’s actually going.


2007-12-18 ABC Consumer Confidence

ABC Consumer Confidence (Dec 16)

Survey n/a
Actual -17
Prior -23
Revised n/a

The CNBC Effect wearing off some?


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Libor Settings, Eur, and UK leading the way lower…

Currency TERM Today Monday Friday Thursday Wednesday Tuesday
USD ON 4.40 4.4175 4.3025 4.30 4.34 4.4325
  1M 4.94875 4.965 4.99625 5.0275 5.1025 5.20375
  3M 4.92625 4.94125 4.96625 4.99063 5.057 5.11125
EUR ON 3.8275 3.98875 3.85875 4.04625 4.055 4.05
  1M 4.58813 4.92375 4.93375 4.935 4.945 4.9225
  3M 4.84875 4.94688 4.94688 4.94938 4.9525 4.92688
GBP ON 5.5975 5.5975 5.600 5.60875 5.685 5.7000
  1M 6.49125 6.54125 6.5925 6.60375 6.74625 6.73875
  3M 6.38625 6.43125 6.49625 6.51375 6.62688 6.625

Seems coordinated – move working as expected.

The sizes should be unlimited- it’s about price and not quantity – the size of the operations doesn’t alter net reserve balances.

All they are doing/can do is offering a lower cost option to member banks, not additional funding.

Bank lending is not constrained by reserve availability in any case, just the price of reserves.

Bank lending is constrained by regulation regarding ‘legal’ assets and bank judgement of creditworthiness and willingness to risk shareholder value.

The Fed’s $ lines to the ECB allows the ECB to lower the cost of $ funding for it’s member banks. To the extent they are in the $ libor basket that move serves to help the Fed target $ libor rates.

Regarding the $:

As per previous posts, when a eurozone bank’s $ assets lose value, they are ‘short’ the $, and cover that short by selling euros to buy $.

The ECB also gets short $ if it borrows them to spend. So far that hasn’t been reported. There has been no reported ECB intervention in the fx markets, nor is any expected.

When the ECB borrows $ to lend to eurozone banks it is acting as broker and not getting short $ per se. It is helping the eurozone banks to avoid forced sales/$ losses of $ assets due to funding issues. If the assets go bad via defaults and $ are lost that short will then get covered as above.

‘Borrowing $ to spend’ is ‘getting short the $’ regardless of what entity does it. So the reduction in credit growth due to sub prime borrowers no longer being able to borrow to spend was ‘deflationary’ and eliminated a source of $ weakness.

The non resident sector is, however, going the other way as they are increasing imports from the US and reducing their deflationary practice of selling in the US and not spending their incomes.

Portfolio shifts- both by domestics and foreigners- out of the $ driven by management decision (not trade flows) drive down the currency to the point where buyers are found. The latest shift seems to have moved the $ down to where the the real buyers have come in due to ppp (purchasing power parity) issues, which means that in order to get out of the $ positions the international fund managers had to drive the price down sufficiently to find buyers who wanted $ US to
purchase US domestic production.

These are ‘real buyers’ who are attracted by the low prices of real goods and services created by the portfolio managers dumping their $ holdings. They are selling their euros, pounds, etc. to obtain $US to buy ‘cheap’ real goods, services, real estate, and other $US denominated assets.

Given the tight US fiscal policy and lack of sub prime ‘short sellers’ borrowing to purchase (as above), these buyers can create a bottom for the $ that could be sustained and exacerbated by some of those managers (and super models) who previously went short ‘changing their minds’ and reallocated back to the $US.

Seems US equity managers are vulnerable to getting caught in this prolonged short squeeze as well.

It’s been brought to my attention that over the last several years equity allocations us pension funds- private, state, corporate, etc – have been gravitating to ever larger allocations to non US equities, and are now perhaps 65% non US.

This is probably a result of the under performance of the US sector, and once underway the portfolios are sufficiently large to create a large, macro, ‘bid/offer’ spread. The macro bid side for the trillions that were shifted/reallocated over the last several years was low enough to find buyers for this shift out of both the $ and the US equities to the other currencies. And the shift from $ to real assets also added to agg demand and was an inflationary bias for the $US.

Bottom line – changing portfolio ‘desires’ were accommodated by these portfolios selling at low enough prices to attract ‘real buyers’ which is the macro ‘bid’ side of ‘the market.’

When portfolio desires swing back towards now ‘cheap’ $US assets and these desires accelerate as these assets over perform they only way they can be met in full is to have prices adjust to the ‘macro offered side’ where real goods and services, assets, etc. are reallocated the other direction by that same price discovery process.

more later!


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Greenspan sees early signs of U.S. stagflation

Agree, if food/crude/import&export prices keep rising, there will be serious fireworks between congress and the fed. This will include blaming the fed for the high gasoline prices, for example.

Greenspan sees early signs of U.S. stagflation

U.S. economy is showing early signs of stagflation as growth threatens to stall while food and energy prices soar, former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Sunday.

In an interview on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Greenspan said low inflation was a major contributor to economic growth and prices must be held in check.

“We are beginning to get not stagflation, but the early symptoms of it,” Greenspan said.

“Fundamentally, inflation must be suppressed,” he added. “It’s critically important that the Federal Reserve is allowed politically to do what it has to do to suppress the inflation rates that I see emerging, not immediately, but clearly over the intermediate and longer-term period.”


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Re: liquidity or insolvency–does it matter?

(email with Randall Wray)

On Dec 15, 2007 9:05 PM, Wray, Randall wrote:
> By ________
>
> This time the magic isn’t working.
>
> Why not? Because the problem with the markets isn’t just a lack of liquidity – there’s also a fundamental problem of solvency.
>
> Let me explain the difference with a hypothetical example.
>
> Suppose that there’s a nasty rumor about the First Bank of Pottersville: people say that the bank made a huge loan to the president’s brother-in-law, who squandered the money on a failed business venture.
>
> Even if the rumor is false, it can break the bank. If everyone, believing that the bank is about to go bust, demands their money out at the same time, the bank would have to raise cash by selling off assets at fire-sale prices – and it may indeed go bust even though it didn’t really make that bum loan.
>
> And because loss of confidence can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, even depositors who don’t believe the rumor would join in the bank run, trying to get their money out while they can.

If there wasn’t credible deposit insurance.

>
> But the Fed can come to the rescue. If the rumor is false, the bank has enough assets to cover its debts; all it lacks is liquidity – the ability to raise cash on short notice. And the Fed can solve that problem by giving the bank a temporary loan, tiding it over until things calm down.

Yes.

> Matters are very different, however, if the rumor is true: the bank really did make a big bad loan. Then the problem isn’t how to restore confidence; it’s how to deal with the fact that the bank is really, truly insolvent, that is, busted.

Fed closes the bank, declares it insolvent, ‘sells’ the assets, and transfers the liabilities to another bank, sometimes along with a check if shareholder’s equity wasn’t enough to cover the losses, and life goes on. Just like the S and L crisis.

>
> My story about a basically sound bank beset by a crisis of confidence, which can be rescued with a temporary loan from the Fed, is more or less what happened to the financial system as a whole in 1998. Russia’s default led to the collapse of the giant hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, and for a few weeks there was panic in the markets.
>
> But when all was said and done, not that much money had been lost; a temporary expansion of credit by the Fed gave everyone time to regain their nerve, and the crisis soon passed.

More was lost then than now, at least so far. 100 billion was lost immediately due to the Russian default and more subsequently. So far announced losses have been less than that, and ‘inflation adjusted’ losses would have to be at least 200 billion to begin to match the first day of the 1998 crisis (August 17).

>
> In August, the Fed tried again to do what it did in 1998, and at first it seemed to work. But then the crisis of confidence came back, worse than ever. And the reason is that this time the financial system – both banks and, probably even more important, nonbank financial institutions – made a lot of loans that are likely to go very, very bad.

Same in 1998. It ended only when it was announced Deutsche Bank was buying Banker’s Trust and seemed the next day it all started ‘flowing’ again.

>
> It’s easy to get lost in the details of subprime mortgages, resets, collateralized debt obligations, and so on. But there are two important facts that may give you a sense of just how big the problem is.
>
> First, we had an enormous housing bubble in the middle of this decade. To restore a historically normal ratio of housing prices to rents or incomes, average home prices would have to fall about 30 percent from their current levels.

Incomes are sufficient to support the current prices. That’s why they haven’t gone down that much yet and are still up year over year. Earnings from export industries are helping a lot so far.

>
> Second, there was a tremendous amount of borrowing into the bubble, as new home buyers purchased houses with little or no money down, and as people who already owned houses refinanced their mortgages as a way of converting rising home prices into cash.

Yes, there was a large drop in aggregate demand when borrowers could no longer buy homes, and that was over a year ago. That was a real effect, and if exports had not stepped in to carry the ball, GDP would not have been sustained at current levels.

>
> As home prices come back down to earth, many of these borrowers will find themselves with negative equity – owing more than their houses are worth. Negative equity, in turn, often leads to foreclosures and big losses for lenders.

‘Often’? There will be some losses, but so far they have not been sufficient to somehow reduce aggregate demand more than exports are adding to demand. Yes, that may change, but it hasn’t yet. Q4 GDP forecasts were just revised up 2% for example.

>
> And the numbers are huge. The financial blog Calculated Risk, using data from First American CoreLogic, estimates that if home prices fall 20 percent there will be 13.7 million homeowners with negative equity. If prices fall 30 percent, that number would rise to more than 20 million.

Not likely if income holds up. That’s why the fed said it was watching labor markets closely.

And government tax receipts seem OK through November, which is a pretty good coincident indicator incomes are holding up.

>
> That translates into a lot of losses, and explains why liquidity has dried up. What’s going on in the markets isn’t an irrational panic. It’s a wholly rational panic, because there’s a lot of bad debt out there, and you don’t know how much of that bad debt is held by the guy who wants to borrow your money.

Enough money funds in particular have decided to not get involved in anyting but treasury securities, driving those rates down. That will sort itself out as investors in those funds put their money directly in banks ans other investments paing more than the funds are now earning, but that will take a while.

>
> How will it all end?

This goes on forever – I’ve been watching it for 35 years – no end in sight!

> Markets won’t start functioning normally until investors are
> reasonably sure that they know where the bodies – I mean, the bad
> debts – are buried. And that probably won’t happen until house prices
> have finished falling and financial institutions have come clean about
> all their losses.

And by then it’s too late to invest and all assets prices returned to ‘normal’ – that’s how markets seem to work.

> All of this will probably take years.
>
> Meanwhile, anyone who expects the Fed or anyone else to come up with a plan that makes this financial crisis just go away will be sorely disappointed.

Right, only a fiscal response can restore aggregate demand, and no one is in favor of that at the moment. A baby step will be repealing the AMT and not ‘paying for it’ which may happen.

Meanwhile, given the inflationary bias due to food, crude, and import and export prices in genera, a fiscal boost will be higly controversial as well.


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Lender of next-to-last resort?

There seems to be an alternative to the discount stigma – is the liquidity problem too big for (orthodox) central banks?

The Federal Home Loan Bank System: Lender of Next-to-Last Resort?

Morten Bech, Federal Reserve Bank of New York

When we look at the FHLB balance sheet, we see a $746b surge in net lending to the banking system (at an annualized rate) in Q3. Is it true, then, that banks are suffering from an access to funding? If banks have been shy about tiptoeing to the discount window, they seem to have had no such bashfulness on their way to borrowing or securing advances from FHLB.

How, then, can any Fed official get in front of a microphone with a straight face and say we have a liquidity problem, best addressed by a TAF facility, which at the moment is scheduled to auction off a fraction of that which has already been loaned by FHLB to the banking system?

‘Liquidity’ for fed member banks is about price, not quantity. There is a ‘liquidity problem’ when the term structure of interbank rates isn’t to the fed’s liking.

Currently, the issue seems to be LIBOR – the fed wants the spread over fed funds to be narrower, particularly over year end. The ‘new facility’ should directly address this particular pricing issue.

There is another problem with this injecting liquidity story. If the Fed wishes to maintain the fed funds rate at the current target, assuming the demand curve for reserves remains stable, the Fed will have to remove as many reserves through open market operations as they inject through the TAF.

Yes. Not a problem. The TAF should function exactly that way to narrow spreads above.

If they don’t, the reserves will be in surplus, and the fed funds rate will fall below the target. In fact, the Fed’s balance sheet has been growing relatively slowly, even though they have been easing, especially when compared to the unprecedented expansion of FHLB balance sheet growth.

Yes, again, it’s all about price, not quanity.

The FHLB is acting as a broker – long with some investors/banks/etc and short with others.


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A tale of mixed metaphors

Ben Bernanke will save the world, but first we bleed

Posted by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on 14 Dec 2007 at 12:48

The Bernanke ‘Put’ has expired.

Are Bernanke’s academic doctrines blurring his vision?

The Fed cuts a quarter point, and what happens? Wall Street’s ungrateful wretches knock 294 off the Dow 294 in an hour and half; the home builders index dives 10pc; Japanese bond surge; Euribor spreads rise to an all-time high of 99 basis points.

Have the markets begun to digest the awful possibility that central banks cannot cut rates fast enough to prevent a profits crunch because they are caught between the Scylla of the credit crunch and the Charybdis of inflation, a new deviant form of stagflation?

Nor is there any evidence or credible theory that interest rate cuts would help. For example, fed economists say that 1% rates didn’t do much – it was the fiscal impulse of 03 that added aggregate demand and turned the economy.

US headline CPI is stuck at around 3.5pc to 4pc, German CPI is 3pc (and wholesale inflation 5.7pc), China is 6.9pc, and Russia is skidding out of control at 10pc.

Note ‘out of control’. Mainstream theory says inflation will accelerate once it gets going.

As for the Fed, it now has to fret about the dollar – Banquo’s ghost at every FOMC meeting these days. A little beggar-thy-neighbour devaluation is welcome in Washington: a disorderly rout is another matter. No Fed chairman can sit idly by if half Asia and the Mid-East break their dollar pegs, threatening to end a century of US dollar primacy.

They are more worried about ‘imported inflation’ than ‘primacy’.

Yes, inflation is a snapshot of the past, not the future. It lags the cycle. After the dotcom bust, US prices kept rising for ten months. Alan Greenspan blithely ignored it as background noise, though regional Fed hawks put up a fight.

He had a deflationary global context, as he said publicly and in his book. That has changed, and now import prices are instead rising substantially.

Ben Bernanke has not yet acquired the Maestro’s licence to dispense with the Fed staff model when it suits him.

As above, different global context.

In any case, his academic doctrines may now be blurring his vision.

Not sure why they are, but all evidence is they are based on fixed exchange rate/gold standard theory.

So, in case you thought that every little sell-off on Wall Street was a God-given chance to load up further on equities, let me pass on a few words of caution from the High Priests of finance.

A deluge of pre-Christmas predictions have been flooding into my E-mail box, some accompanied by lavish City lunches. The broad chorus-by now well known – is that the US will hit a brick wall in 2008.

Yes, originally scheduled for 07. Not saying we won’t, but I am saying those forecasting it hae a poor record and suspect models.

Less understood is that Europe, Asia, and emerging markets will also flounder to varying degrees, knocking away yet another prop for US equities – held aloft until now by non-US global earnings.

Yes, that is a risk.

Morgan Stanley has just added a “mild recession” alert for Japan (Buckle Up) on top of its “manufacturing recession risk” for the eurozone. It’s US call (`Recession Coming’), it is no longer hedged about with many ifs or buts. Americans face a “perfect storm” and CAPEX is buckling. Demand will shrink by 1pc a quarter for nine months.

The bank has cut its target MSCI emerging market equities by 6pc next year. I suspect that this will be cut a lot further as the plot thickens, but you have to start somewhere.

They have been bearish all year.

Merrill Lynch has much the same overall view. “The US consumer is on the precipice of its first recessionary phase since 1991. The earnings recession has already arrived.”

Maybe, but no evidence yet. Employment remains sufficient for the consumer to muddle through, and exports are picking up the slack.

“Real estate deflations are unique and have never ended well for the consumer, the credit market, or the economy. Maybe it will be different this time, but we fail to see why.”

The subtraction to aggregate demand due to real estate is maybe a year behind us and rising exports have filled the gap.

And this from a Goldman Sachs note entitled “Quantifying the Stock Market Impact of a Possible Recession.”

“Our team believes that there is about a 40pc to 45pc chance that the US will enter recession over the next six months. If a recession does occur, it has the potential to feed on itself,” said bank’s global markets strategist Peter Berezin.

Goldman just upped their Q4 GDP foregast by 1.5%, and it’s now at 1.8%.

“We expect home prices to decline 7% in 2007 and a further 7% in 2008. But if the US does fall into a recession, home prices could decline by as much 30% nationwide, which would make it the worst housing bust since at least the Great Depression.

“If global growth slows next year as we expect, cyclical stocks that so far have held up quite well may feel more pressure. It seems unlikely that the elevated earnings estimates for next year can be sustained,” he said.

Lots of ‘if’ and ‘we expect’ language, but no actual ‘channels’ to that end. No one seems to have any. Best I can determine if exports hold up, we muddle through.

Now, stocks can do well in a soft-landing (which Goldman Sachs still expects, on balance), since falling interest rates offset lost earnings. But if this does tip over into outright contraction, History is not kind.

Stocks are likely to adjust PE’s to higher interest rates now that expectations are moving toward lower odds of rate cutting due to inflation.

The average fall in S&P 500 over the last 9 recessions is 13pc from peak to trough. These include 1969 (18pc), 1981 (23pc) and 2001 (52pc).

Still up 5% for the year. And it has been an OK leading indicator as well for quite a while.

As for the canard that stocks are currently cheap at a projected P/E ratio of 15.3, this is based on an illusion. US profit margins are currently inflated by 250 basis points above their ten-year average.

Inflated? Seems a byproduct of productivity and related efficiencies. No telling how long that continues. And products changes so fast there is no time for ‘competitive forces’ to drive down prices to marginal revenue with many products; so, margins remain high.

While Goldman Sachs does not use the term, this is obviously a profits bubble. Super-cheap credit in early 2007 – the lowest spreads ever seen – flattered earnings.

Not sure it’s related to ‘cheap credit’ as much as productivity.

I would add too that free global capital flows have allowed corporations to engage in labour arbitrage, playing off cheap Asian wages against the US and European wages. This game is surely played out. Chinese wages are shooting up.

Yes, as above, and this is the global context Bernanke faces – import prices rising rather than falling.

Voters in industrial democracies will not allow capitalists to continue take an ever larger share of the pie. Hence Sarkozy, Hillary Clinton, and the Labour victory in Australia.

Not sure both sides are pro profits. That’s where the campaign funding is coming from and most voters are shareholders or otherwise profit directly and indirectly from corporate profits. Wage earners are a shrinking constituency with diminishing political influence.

Once you strip out this profits anomaly, Goldman Sachs says the P/E ratio is currently 26. This compares with a post-war average of 18, and a pre-recession average of 17.

As above. PE’s are more likely to adjust down near term due to valuation issues – rising interest rates and perception of risk.

“It is clear that if the US enters a recession, there is significant scope for both earnings and stock prices to decline beyond what the market has already priced. The average lag between peak and nadir in stock prices is only 4 months. This implies a swift correction in equity prices.”

Sure, but that’s a big ‘if’.

The spill-over would be a 20pc fall in the DAX (Frankfurt) and the CAC (Paris), 19pc fall on London’s FTSE 250, 13pc on the IBEX (Madrid), and 10pc on the MIB (Milan).

Doesn’t sound catastrophic.

Be advised, this is not a Goldman Sachs prediction: it is merely a warning, should the economy tip over.

Yes, but without a direct reason for a recession, nor a definition of a recession, for that matter.

Now, whatever happens to US, British, French, Spanish, Italian, and Greek house prices, and whatever happens to the Shanghai stock bubble or to Latin American bonds, the Fed and fellow central banks can – and ultimately will – come to the rescue with full-throttle reflation.

Wrong, the fed doesn’t have that button. Lower interest rates maybe, if they dare to do that with the current inflation risks of the triple supply shock of crude, food, and the lower $US.

But as shown with Japan, low rates do not add aggregate demand as assumed.

Merrill says the Fed may cut rates to 2pc. (rates were 1pc in 2003 and 2004). Let me go a step further. It would not surprise me if debt deflation in the Anglo-Saxon countries proves so serious that we reach Japanese extremes – perhaps zero rates, with a dollop of ‘quantitative easing’ for good measure.

Right, and with the same consequences – those moves have nothing to do with aggregate demand.

The Club Med states may need the same, but they will not get it because they no longer control their monetary policy. So Heaven help them and their democracies.

True, the systemic risk is in the Eurozone. Not sure he knows why.

The central banks are not magicians, of course. We forget now that Keynes and his allies in the early 1930s knew that monetary policy ‘a l’outrance’ could be used to flood the system by buying bonds. They concluded that such a policy might backfire – possibly causing panic – since investors were not ready for revolutionary methods.

Keynes was right but was talking in the context of the gold standard of the time. Not directly applicable today without ‘adjustments’ to current floating fx regimes.

This at least has changed. The markets expect a bail-out, demand it, and believe religiously in its benign effects.

Ben Bernanke said in his 2002 ‘helicopter’ speech that there was practically no limit to what sorts of assets the Fed could buy in order to inject money.

No limits, but big differences to aggregate demand. Buying securities has no effect on demand, while buying real goods and services has an immediate effect, also as Keynes and others have pointed out many times.

The bank’s current mandate does not allow it to buy equities, but that could be changed easily enough.

Yes. Won’t support demand, but will support equity prices.

So yes, in the end, the Fed can always stop a deflationary spiral.

Yes, but more precisely, the tsy, as they can buy goods and services without nominal limit and support demand at any level they desire. The ‘risks’ are ‘inflation’ not solvency. (See ‘Soft Currency Economics‘.)

As Bernanke said to Milton Freidman on his 90th birthday, the Fed will not repeat the monetary crunch it allowed to happen 1930-32.

That was in the context of the gold standard of the day. Not applicable currently.

“Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

Thanks to floating the $, it hasn’t happened since.

Bernanke is undoubtedly right. The Fed won’t do it again. But before the United States can embark on an economic course that radically transforms the nature of capitalism, speculative markets may have to take a beating – for appearances sake, at least.


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2007-12-14 US Economic Releases

2007-12-14 Consumer Price Index MoM

Consumer Price Index MoM (Nov)

Survey 0.6%
Actual 0.8%
Prior 0.4%
Revised n/a

2007-12-14 CPI Ex Food & Energy MoM

CPI Ex Food & Energy (Nov)

Survey 0.2%
Actual 0.3%
Prior 0.2%
Revised n/a

2007-12-14 Consumer Price Index YoY

Consumer Price Index YoY (Nov)

Survey 4.1%
Actual 4.3%
Prior 3.5%
Revised n/a

2007-12-14 CPI Ex Food & Energy YoY

CPI Ex Food & Energy YoY(Nov)

Survey 2.3%
Actual 2.3%
Prior 2.2%
Revised n/a

2007-12-14 CPI Core Index SA

CPI Core Index SA (Nov)

Survey n/a
Actual 210.177
Prior 212.050
Revised n/a

2007-12-14 Consumer Price Index NSA

Consumer Price Index NSA (Nov)

Survey 209.800
Actual 210.177
Prior 208.936
Revised n/a

Pretty frisky inflation number with one apparent anomaly

  • Headline is 0.796% MoM and 4.3% YoY.
  • Core 0.275% MoM and 2.3% YoY.
  • Many components on trend: OER 0.3%, medical 0.4%, recreation 0.1%, tobacco 0.2%
  • Apparel was off-trend, rising 0.8%.
  • Within apparel, mens and women’s clothing were both negative for the month. So the sole source within this category was ‘toddler and infant’ clothing, rising 1.7%.
  • This would have knocked down core enough to round down to 0.2%.
  • But persistence of inflation here disconcerting to Fed.

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Crude oil demand revised up

This means Saudis/Russians will continue to be price setters for at least the next few quarters.

IEA Lifts 2008 World Oil Demand Growth Forecast

By Reuters | 14 Dec 2007 | 05:32 AM ET

World oil demand will grow more quickly than expected next year fueled by the Middle East and proving resilient to record-high prices, the International Energy Agency said on Friday.

The IEA, adviser to 27 industrialized countries, said in its monthly Oil Market Report that demand will rise by 2.1 million barrels per day (bpd) next year, up 200,000 bpd from its previous forecast.

“A lot of this demand is in the non-OECD countries, where we don’t have any downgrades in economic growth forecasts,” said Lawrence Eagles, head of the IEA’s Oil Industry and Markets division.