Succinct Summation of Week’s Events for 5.10.19 (plus Banking Stress: Bad Loan Ratios)

Below is the usual weekly summation with the positives being job openings rising 4.8% and the negative as usual being the ongoing angst of the trade war which was unexpectedly escalated this week with the new tariffs.  And despite the increase in job openings, jobless claims came in higher than expected.  The bonus this week is a handy little illustration that shows that, relative to the rest of the world, the U.S. is in pretty good shape in terms of how much bad debt our economy is carrying.  At 1.1%, our bad loan ratio is close to being the lowest in the world.  At 27% between the two of them, Italy and India are among the highest.  Hope everyone had a wonderful Mother's Day weekend.

Succinct Summation of Week’s Events for 5.10.19

May 10, 2019 4:00pm by Barry Ritholtz

Succinct Summations for the week ending May 10th, 2019

Positives:

1. Uber manages to IPO without incident, despite lots of market volatility;
2. Same store sales rose 5.9% w/o/w, higher than the previous increase of 5.5%.
3. Job openings rose 4.8% m/o/m from 7.142M to 7.488M.
4. Home mortgage apps rose 4.0% w/o/w after previous 4.0% decrease.
5. International trade deficit came in at $-50.0B, lower than expected $-50.2B

Negatives:

1. The Tweeter-in-Chief escalated the trade war, taking tariffs up significantly on China, and greatly disrupted equity markets;
2. CPI rose 0.3% m/o/m, less than the expected increase of 0.4%.
3. Jobless claims came in at 228k for the week, greater than the expected 215k.
4. Wholesale inventories fell 0.1% m/o/m, lower than the previous increase of 0.4%.
5. PPI-FD rose 0.2% m/o/m, below the expected increase of 0.3%.