10 Things You Need To Know: January 23, 2024
Key data releases this week include: leading economic indicators (Mon), Q4 GDP (Thu), durable goods orders (Thu), new home sales (Thu), pending home sales (Fri), personal income and spending (Fri), and PCE deflator (Fri).
MarketWatch
January 22, 2024
The leading indicators of the U.S. economy fell in December for the 21st month in a row. The leading index slid 0.1% last month. It’s the smallest decline since the stretch of negative readings first started in March 2022. Economists had forecast a 0.3% drop. Six of the 10 indicators in the survey were positive in December, a big improvement compared to prior months.
Haver
January 17, 2024
Retail sales increased 0.6% during December following an unrevised 0.3% November gain and a 0.3% October fall, revised from -0.2%. A 0.4% rise had been expected in the Action Economics Forecast Survey. Sales in the retail group, which excludes autos, building materials, gasoline & restaurants, increased 0.8% (5.6% y/y) after a 0.5% November rise.
Haver
January19, 2024
Sales of existing homes declined 1.0% (-6.2% y/y) during December to 3.78 million (SAAR) after an unrevised 0.8% November gain. The Action Economics Forecast Survey expected December sales of 3.83 million units. The median price of all existing homes (NSA) fell 1.3% (+4.4% y/y) to $382,600, the sixth consecutive month of decline. Prices were 7.5% below the June 2022 peak of $41. 3,800.
Barron’s
January 22, 2024
Of the 43 S&P 500 companies that had reported by Thursday morning, 88% beat the consensus earnings-per-share estimate—but 60% of that group fell the following day, and 72% of them trail the index since reporting. Wall Street’s consensus calls for 11% S&P 500 EPS growth in 2024—which would help justify an index trading at about 20 times forward earnings.
Reuters, CNBC
January 18, 2024 , January 18, 2024
Interest-rate cuts could begin in the third quarter, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic says. Earlier cuts could be appropriate, but “the evidence would need to be convincing,” says Bostic, who emphasizes that premature cuts come with risk.
Capital Economics
January 18, 2024
As core PCE inflation is on track to return to the 2% target by the middle of this year, we expect the Fed to cut interest rates by 25bp at every meeting from March onwards, with rates eventually falling to between 3.00% and 3.25% in early 2025. The lagged impact of previous monetary tightening will continue to feed through in H1, however, pushing GDP growth below potential. But rate cuts should fuel a pick-up in GDP growth in the second half of the year.
The Hill, The Washington Post
January 28, 2024, January 18, 2024
The House and the Senate have passed legislation that would avert a partial government shutdown this weekend by extending funding into March. The legislation, which now heads to President Joe Biden for his signature, would provide more time for a longer-term deal by extending certain funding deadlines to March 1 and others to March 8.
Reuters, The Wall Street Journal
January 16,2024, January 16, 2024
The chairs of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees said that congressional negotiators have crafted a $78 billion tax package that would restore certain deductions for companies, in addition to boosting the low-income housing credit and expanding the child tax credit. The bill, known as. the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act, will still need approval from both houses of Congress.
Bloomberg
January 22, 2024
Artificial intelligence can’t replace the majority of jobs right now in cost-effective ways, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a study that sought to address fears about AI replacing humans in a swath of industries. They found only 23% of workers, measured in terms of dollar wages, could be effectively supplanted. In other cases, because AI-assisted visual recognition is expensive to install and operate, humans did the job more economically.