October 13, 2009 • 8:09 am
The calendar for the week has a key piece of data that you’ll want to watch out for. We have August Retail Sales data to be released on Wednesday morning. The consensus among a survey of economists conducted by Bloomberg suggests that this figure will decline by 2.1% after having surged 2.7% in the month prior. This may be overly pessimistic as a reading of -2.1% on the sales side would imply that spending among the US public was at its worst since last December, when it tanked 3.2%. Keep in mind that since the start of the year, Retail Sales have only shrunk in two of the months. Such a swing to the downside would be a sharp change in the public’s mindset.
Note that when excluding automobiles from the metric, the consensus forecast is set for an increase of 0.2%. This leads one to believe that automobile sales plummeted throughout the month, causing the broader metric to sink as well. This might not necessarily true. The popular “Cash for Clunkers” program was extended during this period and saw car purchases soar. In fact, there was a 25% jump in the number of autos sold. So there is little reason to believe that August saw such a pathetic performance in Retail Sales.
What to take away from this: Retail traders may splurge on stocks when they see that this number is surprisingly high. But one must ask themselves if this high figure is surely sustainable. Keep in mind that this data is for August and not for September – that’s five weeks back. Cash for Clunkers is over with and there is now little incentive to keep car purchases up. Just moments ago, Philips released it’s Q3 earnings report. In it, they said that the structural recovery in their primary end-markets has been absent. This speaks contrary to that which has been heard from the popular media and other pundits.
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New Zealand’s economy shrunk by -0.9% in the three months ending 2008 after economists had expected this south-Pacific country’s GDP to contract by more. The move marks the fourth straight quarter that the island-nation has seen its annual output decrease.
Since July the central bank has slashed interest rates by 5.25% to 3.0% in an effort to provide short-term liquidity to businesses and financial markets in order to stave off the effects of the global recession.
Now, in its fourth straight quarter of contraction, the New Zealand economy has shed thousands of job. In the final three months of 2008, their unemployment rate jumped 0.4 percentage points to 4.6%, the highest level since 2003. Their Treasury department predicts that it will get worse. They have forecast that by early 2010 the jobless rate may jump to an 11-year high of 7.2%.
Yesterday, the IMF released a report stating that New Zealand’s economy would contract a total of 2.0% in 2009 after 2008 experienced a slight 0.1% decrease. One key “vulnerability” that is likely to keep the country under water is the extensive amount of short-term borrowing from abroad, the IMF said.
This final period of the year saw the country’s currency depreciate by as much as -20.95%, but ended the quarter down only 10.15%.
- LG
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New Zealand’s trade balance in February improved substantially from that which was expected. The figure jumped to 489.0 million from an expected 75.0 million after imports fell 11.6%.
The alleviating news comes just a day after Bill English, the nation’s Minister of Finance, said that the current account gap is “uncomfortably large.”
Imports fell as the New Zealand Dollar continued to stifle the purchasing power that domestic residents had for goods produced abroad. The first two months of the year saw their currency depreciate 16.57% against its U.S. counterpart and 9.12% against a trade-weighted basket of currencies.
The amount of goods shipped to the country from Europe fell by a staggering 21.3% and 14% from Asia.
- LG
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FT Editor Lionel Barber interviews China’s Premier Hu Jintao
