These spiked up with the Presidential election and are only slowly coming back down:

Muddling through at just over a 2% annual rate, but q2 looking weaker than q1:

Highlights

Forget about all the strength in the low sample-sized regional reports. Government data are not pointing to strength at all as manufacturing readings in the May industrial production report are a matter of concern.

Industrial production could manage no better than an unchanged reading in May while the manufacturing component fell 0.4 percent. Both are lower than expected with manufacturing below Econoday’s low estimate.

Vehicle production fell sharply in the month, down 2.0 percent in a reminder that consumer spending on autos has been very weak this year. And in a reminder of how weak capital goods data have been, production of business equipment fell 0.7 percent. Hi-tech goods, in yet further confirmation of trouble, were unchanged in the month.

The mining component is a positive in this report, up 1.6 percent for a second straight strong gain, with the utilities component also positive, at plus 0.4 percent.

But manufacturing makes up the vast bulk of the nation’s industrial sector and today’s report makes April’s strength look very isolated. This report is bad news for durables data yet to be released not to mention factory payrolls.

Note that traditional non-NAICS numbers for industrial production may differ marginally from NAICS basis figures.

Housing is sagging in line with sagging bank real estate lending:

Highlights

Home builders have been very optimistic this year but are a little less upbeat this month. The housing market index slipped to 67 in June, down 2 points from a downward revised 69 in May and just below Econoday’s low estimate. But expectations for future sales, at 76, remain unusually strong with current sales also unusually strong at 73. The one component, however, that had been coming to life is back below 50 as traffic fell 2 points to 49. Lack of traffic, and here the emphasis is on first-time buyers, does not point to renewed strength for home sales data which started the year very strong but have since slowed. Regional data are very solid with the West, Midwest, and South all clumped near composite scores of 70 while the Northeast continues to lag in the distance at 46. Watch for housing starts on tomorrow’s calendar where snap-back strength is the call.

This is part of the reason the Fed hiked rates…
;)

States tend to be pro cyclical. As tax collections slow, so does spending:

Trumped up expectations coming off only slowly. Actual business conditions have
not yet responded:

Not much optimism here:

Trumped up expectations reversed more quickly here:

Indicates active selling of US equities and buying of euro equities. This could be part of the process of portfolio managers selling $US to buy euro, reversing shifting in the other direction for the last several years as portfolios shifted out of euro due to political fears and fears of ‘money printing’ by the ECB, which have failed to be of expected consequence.

Meanwhile, at current fx prices, the massive euro area trade surplus continues, which is by identity a ‘rest of world’ deficit, ‘draining’ that many net euro from the global economy:

This was yesterday’s news and has already been replaced by today’s stories as this type of thing seems to be growing exponentially:

“Never has there been a president, with few exceptions … who has passed more legislation, done more things,” Trump declared, even though Congress, which is controlled by his party, hasn’t passed any major legislation.

He hailed his plan for the “single biggest tax cut in American history,” even though he hasn’t proposed a plan and Congress hasn’t acted on one.

He said “no one would have believed” his election could have created so many new jobs over the past seven months (1.1 million), even though more jobs (1.3 million) were created in the previous seven months.

The collapse continues.

With total bank credit just over $12.5 trillion, it’s about $500 billion less than it would have been had last year’s loan growth continued.

If this lower rate of loan growth continues, and isn’t replaced by some other channel that facilitates agents spending more than their incomes, the implication is that GDP could be a full 2% less than last year, as a substantial portion of bank lending finances purchases of real goods and services:

Looks like another rate hike coming from the Fed next week.

Seems to me the Fed models (not mine) tell them rates work through the credit channels, the idea being a rate hike will slow down credit growth and thereby keep the economy from overheating, etc.

But with credit growth as it is per the above charts, seems they are already decelerating.

So what would be the point of a rate hike?

To make credit growth decelerate even faster?

Inventory to sales ratio coming down but remains elevated:

Capital expenditures have come back some since the shale bust, but remain depressed:

The year over year deceleration continues as also reflected in consumer spending:

Maybe the reasoning openings are so much higher than hires is because openings are for jobs that pay less than current employees are earning, in the hopes the company can replace them? ;)

Highlights

Job openings are nearly 1 million ahead of hirings in a widening spread pointing to skill scarcity in the labor market. Job openings totaled 6.044 million in April which is well outside Econoday’s high estimate for 5.765 million and up from a revised 5.785 million in the prior month. Hirings totaled 5.051 million which is well down from March’s 5.304 million with the spread between the two nearly 150,000 higher at 993,000.

Job openings, representing labor demand, is a complementary statistic to unemployment, which represents labor supply. Useful comparisons for this report are the 6.9 million unemployed and the 12.4 million in the total available labor pool. The gap between openings and hiring first opened up about 2 years ago signaling that employers are having a hard time finding people with the right skills. Today’s report offers confirmation that demand for labor, in distinction to hiring, is a chief feature of the economy.

This chart doesn’t look so good to me:

Press Release: Black Knight’s Mortgage Monitor: Q1 2017 Originations Fall 34 Percent, Led By 45 Percent Drop in Refinance Lending; Despite Recent Rate Softening, Home Affordability Remains Near Post-Recession Low

Today, the Data & Analytics division of Black Knight Financial Services, Inc. released its latest Mortgage Monitor Report, based on data as of the end of April 2017. This month, Black Knight looked at Q1 2017 purchase and refinance originations, finding significant quarterly declines in volume among both. As Black Knight Data & Analytics Executive Vice President Ben Graboske explained, the declines are rooted in the upward interest rate shift seen in Q4 2016.

“Overall, first lien mortgage originations fell by 34 percent in the first quarter of 2017,” said Graboske. “As expected, the decline was most pronounced in the refinance market, which saw a 45 percent decline from Q4 2016 and were down 20 percent from last year. They also made up a smaller share of overall originations than in the past; just 45 percent of total Q1 originations were refinances vs. 54 percent in Q4 2016. Purchase originations were also down 21 percent from Q4 2016, although the first quarter is historically the calendar-year low for such lending. Purchase lending was up year-over-year, but the three percent annual growth is a marked decline from Q4 2016’s 12 percent, and marks the slowest growth rate Black Knight has observed in more than three years – going back to Q4 2013. At that point in time, interest rates had risen abruptly – very similarly to what we saw at the end of 2016 – and originations slowed considerably. The same dynamic is at work here.

“Likewise, refinance lending among higher-credit-score borrowers, who have largely driven the refinance market these past several years, saw a quarterly decline of 50 percent. As we’ve seen in the past, these borrowers tend to strike quickly and often when interest rate incentives are present, but tend to hold back when the conditions are less favorable. At the other end of the credit spectrum, lower credit borrowers – those with credit scores below 700 – only saw refinance volumes decrease by 24 percent. Again, we saw a similar phenomenon when rates rose in late 2013/early 2014. This is worth noting as we monitor the future performance of 2017 originations. Not only are refinances — which generally tend to outperform purchase mortgages — making up a smaller share of the market, but there’s also been a net lowering of average credit scores as well. The average Q1 2017 refinance credit score was 742, down from 751 in Q4 2016, and the lowest average credit score since Q3 2014. Both of these factors could have a dampening factor on mortgage performance, holistically speaking.”

Read more at http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/#IWytwlvI9bjUdXXs.99

The charts show it all went bad around November. And it continues to deteriorate with every passing week, with the latest data showing cars, housing, and employment decelerating accordingly.
Must have been some event that set it off? It was around the time of the election, but I can’t recall specifically what would set off something like this?
Comments welcome!