Investing Curiouscatblog

Author: John Hunter

  • Saving Spurts as Spending Slashed

    One factor you must understand when evaluating economic data is that the data is far from straight forward. Even theoretically it is often confusing what something like “savings rate” should represent. And even if that were completely clear the ability to get data that accurately measures what is desired is often difficult if not impossible. Therefore most often there is plenty of question about economic conditions even when examining the best available data. Learning about these realities is important if you wish to be financially literate.

    Bigger U.S. Savings Than Official Stats Suggest

    The official data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis say that in February personal spending was down 0.4%, or $40 billion, from the year before. Certainly any drop is bad news, since consumer spending rarely decreases – but $40 billion out of total spending of $10 trillion doesn’t seem like enough to wreak economic havoc.

    A closer look, however, shows that Americans have tightened their belts more sharply than the numbers report. The reason? Official figures for personal spending include a lot of categories, such as Medicare outlays, that are not under the control of households. They also include items, such as education spending, that should be treated as investment in the future rather than current consumption.

    After removing these spending categories from the data, let’s call what’s left “pocketbook” spending – the money that consumers actually lay out at retailers and other businesses. By this measure, Americans have cut consumption by $200 billion, or 3.1%, over the past year. This explains why the downturn has hit Main Street hard.
    …
    Finally, for technical reasons the BEA throws in some “spending” categories where no money actually changes hands. The biggest is “rent on owner-occupied housing,” the money that people supposedly pay themselves for living in their own homes. Despite the housing bust, this number rose by 2.6% over the past year, to $1.1 trillion.
    …
    A closer look at BEA numbers shows that Americans reduced spending by 3.1% in the past year, indicating that the savings rate has risen to 6.4%

    He raises good issues to consider though I am not sure I agree 100% with his reasoning.

    Related: The USA Should Reduce Personal and Government Debt – Financial Markets with Robert Shiller – Save Some of Each Raise – Over 500,000 Jobs Disappeared in November (2008)

  • USA Unemployment Rate Jumps to 9.4%

    Nonfarm payroll employment fell by 345,000 in May, about half the average monthly decline for the prior 6 months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. The unemployment rate continued to rise, increasing from 8.9 to 9.4 percent. Steep job losses continued in manufacturing, while declines moderated in construction and several service-providing industries.

    According to the Household Survey Data, the number of unemployed persons increased by 787,000 to 14.5 million in May, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.4 percent. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons has risen by 7.0 million, and the unemployment rate has increased by 450 basis points.

    Unemployment rates rose in May for adult men (to 9.8%), adult women (7.5%). Among the unemployed, the number of job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs rose by 732,000 in May to 9.5 million. This group has increased by 5.8 million since the start of the recession.

    The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) increased by 268,000 over the month to 3.9 million and has tripled since the start of the recession.

    The civilian labor force at the end of May, 2009 stood at 155,081,000 (at the end of April was 154,731,000) growing by 350,000, employment stood at 140,570,000 down from 141,007,000 the month before. The ranks of unemployed grew to 14,511,000 from 13,724,000.

    Related: Unemployment Rate Increased to 8.9% – USA Unemployment Rate Rises to 8.1%, Highest Level Since 1983 – Bad News on Jobs

  • Paying for Over-spending

    Trading down

    Americans are rediscovering thrift. Retail sales fell by 11% from their peak in late 2007 to April 2009. Personal consumption has fallen 2.5% since last summer.
    …
    A recent Pew poll found that 21% of Americans planned to grow their own vegetables, 16% had held a garage sale or sold things online and 10% had either taken in a friend or relative or moved in with one. Pundits are coining phrases such as “austerity chic” and “luxury shame”. Four-fifths of Americans told the BCG they would defer big purchases that can wait.
    …
    The beneficiaries of the new parsimony are, unsurprisingly, firms that offer low prices. The only two stocks on the Dow Jones Industrial Average that rose in 2008 were Wal-Mart and McDonald’s.
    …
    The hangover from this party will be long and painful. Households’ total outstanding borrowing fell in the fourth quarter of 2008, for the first time since the second world war. The personal-saving rate rose to 4.2% in the first quarter of 2009, from a nadir of minus 0.7% in 2005. “It is easy to see how consumer deleveraging could result in hundreds of billions of dollars-worth of forgone consumption in coming years,” say Martin Baily, Susan Lund and Charles Atkins of the McKinsey Global Institute.

    American consumers are burdened by far too much consumer debt. And spending on non-essentials with debt is un-wise and creates personal risks and a weak (fundamentally) economy. It is true the current economic data will look good when people spend money they don’t have. But it just creates a huge burden for the future economy to cope with.

    Related: USA Consumers Paying Down Debt – Too Much Personal Debt – $2,540,000,000,000 in USA Consumer Debt

  • GM and Citigroup Replaced by Cisco and Travelers in the Dow

    Starting next Monday GM and Citigroup will no longer be in the list of 30 companies making up the Dow Jones Industrial Average. I posted in 2005 that GM should be dropped from the DJIA. GE has lasted in the Dow for more than 100 years. 12 of the 30 stocks have been added since 1997. Cisco and Travelers are the companies that are joining the Dow on June 8th.

    The 30 stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as of June 8th, 2009:

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    Stock Market Capitalization Year Added
    Exxon (XOM)             $347 Billion     1928
    Walmart (WMT) 195     1997
    Microsoft 189     1999
    Proctor & Gamble (PG) 155     1932
    Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) 153     1997
    GE 147     1896
    AT&T (T) 145     1999
    IBM 143     1979
    JPMorgan Chase (JPM) 141     1991
    Chevron (CVX) 138     2008
    Coca-Cola (KO) 113     1987
    Cisco (CSCO) 112     2009
    Pfizer (PFE) 100     2004
    Intel (INTC)   91     1999

  • Manage Your Borrowing and Avoid Debt Negotiators

    Debt Negotiators May Give Little Relief to Consumers

    “They never told me that the money I was paying wasn’t going to my debt, it was going to them,” said Hopkins, 59, who quit work in January 2008 after a brain tumor led to surgery. He now receives $1,539 a month in disability checks. “You are better on your own.”

    Credit-card delinquencies are at record highs, according to Fitch Ratings, and the U.S. unemployment rate of 8.9 percent is the highest since 1983. As more consumers fall behind on bills, settlement companies often end up adding to the debt burden rather than offering a cost-saving solution, said Gail Cunningham, a spokeswoman for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling in Silver Spring, Maryland.
    …
    New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has begun a national investigation of settlement companies, and has sued two for fraud and false advertising. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has also filed two lawsuits against debt-settlement companies, alleging they “engage in deceptive marketing practices” and “do little or nothing to improve consumers’ financial standings.” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott sued a debt settlement company in March, saying it engaged in “deceptive and misleading acts,” according to court documents.

    It is much better to avoid this problem by taking wise personal finance actions – don’t take on personal debt for minor purchases (for a mortgage then debt is fine, probably fine for a car – though avoid debt if you can). The “secret” is not very secret. Just don’t buy what you can’t pay for. It is very simple, many people just don’t want to follow that simple strategy. Also save money in an emergency fund, so when some emergency comes along you don’t go into debt. You just use your emergency fund.

    Once you are stuck in a bad situation with more debt than you can afford to pay back you have bad choices. Obviously many try to take advantage of you. Frankly they realize many that are stuck in bad financial position make bad financial decisions. Therefor it is a good place for those trying to rip people off to find people to take advantage of. The best way to deal with this is not to try and find the best debt negotiators it is to manage you finances well and not get in trouble.

    Related: Personal Saving and Personal Debt in the USA – How to Use a Credit Card Successfully – Credit Card Companies Willing to Deal Over Debt – Where to Keep Your Emergency Funds? – Americans are Drowning in Debt

  • Manufacturing Cars in the USA

    The current economic climate is very bad and all car manufacturing in the USA has declined in the last 2 years. But the longer term trend is that foreign companies are manufacturing more and more here while the USA companies fail to. This year it is likely the “big three” will manufacture fewer than 50% of the cars manufactured in the USA (the “big three” have more production in Canada and Mexico than the “foreign” companies do).

    They Can Build Them; Why Can’t We?

    non-U.S. automakers are still building U.S. factories. Volkswagen is erecting an assembly plant in Tennessee, Kia Motors has a plant going up in Georgia, and Toyota Motor is putting one up in Mississippi, although it has delayed opening there because of the slump in auto sales. Foreign auto manufacturers and suppliers already have a massive presence in the U.S.
    …
    This transplant industry is replacing Detroit’s manufacturing. Through mid May, all North American assembly plants (including Canada and Mexico) have built 2.77 million cars and light trucks, half the production level of the year-earlier period. Of these, Detroit’s Big Three have built only 1.5 million of these vehicles, just 268,000 more than the transplants.
    …
    Toyota took over a badly managed GM plant in California; it was a joint venture, but the Japanese ran the plant. GM sent young executives to work there and learn Toyota’s manufacturing and quality techniques. They learned, but when they came back to GM, the GM bureaucracy would not change its ways.

    Read about the joint Toyota – GM plant: Remembering NUMMI. The problems of GM, Ford and Chrysler are due mainly to long term failures or management. It is not impossible to manufacture in the USA. But it is difficult to maintain poor management systems, without overpaid executives when others manage better and don’t take so much of the profits into their own pockets.

    Related: posts on manufacturing – Big Failed Three, Meet the Successful Eight – Leading Manufacturing Countries in 2007 – Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year – People: Team Members or Costs

  • Is Productivity Growth Bad?

    Why Rising Productivity Is Cause for Worry

    But history also tells us something else: Massive economic disruptions are typically accompanied by weak or negative productivity growth, because businesses have trouble raising money and operating efficiently. Output per hour stagnated in the two deepest postwar recessions, 1974-75 and 1981-82. During the worst of the Great Depression, 1929 to 1933, productivity plunged.
    …
    But there may be another, less benign, reason for rising productivity. In past downturns, educated professionals have escaped mainly unscathed. This time businesses are relentlessly hacking at their professional workforce—a tactic that boosts short-term productivity while hurting long-term growth. Rising productivity may be a sign of weakness, not strength.

    Over the past year the number of employed professionals has fallen by 0.7%, a rare decline. Outside of the still-growing education and health-care occupations, the number of employed professionals has dropped by a dramatic 3.6%.

    Cutting productive staff for short term rewards is definitely a negative for long term productivity. My guess is the management ranks are not as productive as the non-management ranks are however. My sense is their is more room to eliminate non-value added activity from management positions which will not harm long term productivity growth.

    A good way to improve productivity is to reduce excessive pay for senior executives. As the money wasted on exorbitant pay that senior executives lavish on themselves is reduced the capital wasted on them can be better deployed in ways that will improve productivity.

    Related: The Real Threat Is Decreased Productivity – Manufacturing Productivity (data accuracy) – Manufacturing Contracting Globally
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  • Home Prices Fall by Record 19%

    Home prices fall by record 19.1 percent in 1Q

    The National Index, which is released quarterly and covers a broader area than the monthly 20- and 10-city indexes, posted a 19% drop in the first quarter from a year earlier and a 7.5% decline from the fourth quarter.
    …
    New York still is up 73.4% from January 2000, though down 19.7% from its June 2006 peak. The Detroit index is 29% lower than in January 2000. Detroit home prices are back to their mid-1995 levels.

    Phoenix, Las Vegas and San Francisco continued to lead year-over-year decliners, with drops over 30%. Minneapolis led month-to-month decliners, as the rate of decline accelerated there. The rates of decline also accelerated in Boston, Detroit, Las Vegas, Miami, New York, Portland, San Diego and Seattle.

    Dallas, Denver, Cleveland, Boston and Charlotte managed to avoid double-digit year-over-year declines. Measuring from each market’s peak, Dallas has suffered the least, down 11.1% from its peak in June 2007; while Phoenix is down 53% from its peak in June of 2006. All of the 20 metro areas are in double digit declines from their peaks, with two — Phoenix and Las Vegas — in excess of 50%.

    Related: Home Price Declines Exceeding 10% Seen for 20% of Housing Markets (Sep 2007) – Nearly 10% of Mortgages Delinquent or in Foreclosure – Record Home Price Declines (Sep 2008)

  • Growing Crude Storage in China

    Growing Crude Storage in China

    “Our analysis confirms that tanker capacity arrivals into China have spiked up in recent months, in line with imports, but more importantly, tanker arrivals into Strategic Petroleum Reserve ports have increased materially,” Bernstein says
    …
    Bernstein estimates that the amount of crude entering the SPR ports in China—the world’s second biggest oil consumer after the U.S.–has increased by around 400,000 barrels a day since November, based on its assessment using the satellite imaging services of Google, the search engine company.
    …
    There’s likely more to come. Bernstein says satellite images show a marked increase in oil-storage construction over the past few years and estimates that China’s number of days of forward demand–a gauge of oil storage–amount to just 28 days of imports and 14 days of total demand.

    China is targeting storage capacity that will hold demand cover of around 90 days. (The U.S. currently has storage for about 62 days of oil imports.) In other words, there’s a lot more oil still to be packed away in China now and in the coming years as more facilities are built.

    This is another smart move by China, in my opinion. With the huge amount of cash they are holding, I would rather hold more of it as crude than dollars. And stockpiling the crude also protects the domestic demand from supply shocks. I would also take other steps they are taking, like investing heavily in adding wind power capacity.

    Related: I Wouldn’t Sell Oil at These Prices – Who Will Buy All the USA’s Debt? – Oil Consumption by Country – South Korea To Invest $22 Billion in Overseas Energy Projects

  • Deficit Threat from Health Care Costs

    Economist blog post on Health care:

    Peter Orszag reminds us that the real deficit threat comes not from bail-outs, wars, or Social Security, but from health care. Medicare is set to become a drain on federal finances by 2017. If health-care costs continue to grow at the same rate, the cost of Medicare and Medicaid will be 20% of GDP by 2050. American health care is a model of inefficiency; there appears to be little correlation between spending and outcomes.
    …
    In hindsight there seems something rather perverse about only providing the best care to retired workers. In theory, the government should make private insurance cheaper for everyone else because then the young won’t have to subsidise (at least through their health-care premiums) the old. The main problem, which European countries have learned, is that sustainable, government-provided care and timely access to the most innovative treatments tends to be mutually exclusive.

    Related: Many Experts Say Health-Care System Inefficient, Wasteful – Improving the Health Care System – USA Spent $2.2 Trillion, 16.2% of GDP, on Health Care in 2007