Calling this another V-sign of recovery might leave me open to more charges of being a cheerleader for the economy and having abandoned objectivity, so let me just say this chart shows that conditions in the service sector have improved quite a bit over the past year. Strength in the service sector is showing up across the board: in plans for new hiring, in new orders, in prices (see chart below), and in new export orders. And since the service sector is the largest sector of the economy by far, this is all very good news on the economic outlook front, and stocks are right to be cheering today.
If you are the cheerleader, then give me some poms-poms too.
ReplyDeleteNothing wrong with optimism.
The worst does seem over. In contrast to Scott, I think fiscal stimulus does hlep, and has.
We still have federal debt, and two open-ended wars as a specter, but hopefully investors will look past that. These wars are funded by borrowing--not good.
Still, corporate profits going up, inflation is dead, worker productivity continues to rise.
Die, recession, die, die, die.
If it looks like V and charts like a V chances are it's a V!
ReplyDeleteThanks Scott.
I am on a beach in Florida today that we have come to every Easter for many years. This is purely anecdotal but I am having difficulty remembering a year when the crowds were as large. The beach is packed. Literally packed with people. Some of it is spring breakers but I am seeing many, many families with young children. The restaurants are full and condo vacancy is low. Just FWIW.
ReplyDeleteBTW, if a cheerleader is backing his cheers with hard currency investments I call it putting your money where your mouth is. Not a thing wrong with that in my book.
start looking forward to people using the term "goldilocks" again. we are recovering, without overheating. the only question i have is whether investors will start selling on the good news of 1Q reports. i am staying long because my sense, and it is only a sense, is that we are still in a validating phase of a bull run (whether a secular or cyclical bull i will leave to fortune tellers), and that good 1Q reports, which i expect, will only lead to more upward revisions for Y2010, thereby providing more room for equities to grow.
ReplyDeleteThere is a finance professor at Seton Hall University that I consider one of the few 'professors' that is truly market savvy. I'm sure there must be many more but I've just never been exposed to them. Anyway, he wrote recently that the market is transitioning from a liquidity extraction model to a liquidity deployment model, and that those who only understood post 1999 markets are going to be taken by surprise as the markets return to their roots.
ReplyDeleteNow to a an old country boy like me, he's saying the yields are bein' yanked away and money's huntin' a home. We're goin' back to the old days and an awful lotta folks are gonna be surprsed at the gamescore when its done.
I think the guy has it pretty right. He just talks funny.