STOCK MARKET WATCH: Monday, 5 August 2024

[progree]

3. As the 10 year Treasury bond yield dives

I wish they had a 6-month time frames like the other kshitij.com graphs, for easy comparison and to zoom on more recent, but they don't.

Anyway it looks like the 10 year yield was almost 5% last October and 4.7% in early May, now its 3.8%.

Good for my intermediate term bond funds (when yields go down, their value goes up), but they are still way down from 3 years ago, and down even more in purchasing power because of inflation.

About the DOW graph - I saw a headline yesterday, "When bad news is bad news again", referring to the bad jobs report causing the Friday stock market plunge.

In the last few years one never knew - a bad economic report often resulted in a good stock market day on hopes that increased the odds of a rate cut. But this time around everyone is blathering about a recession around the corner.

I read a commentary on the Jobs report from The Street about how woefully bad it was. Interestingly they mentioned that the Atlanta Fed's GDPNow estimates next quarter's GDP at 2.5%.

I can't think of many recessions with back to back quarters of 1.6%, 2.8%, 2.5% (Q1, Q2, and projected Q3),

I always thought the informal definition of recession was two back to back NEGATIVE GDP growth numbers. And while the NBER (nber.org), the official arbiter of when recessions and expansions occurs doesn't use that definition, just about every time I think they have called a recession, that's been true - at least 2 negative back-to-back quarters.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_real_gdp_growth

And they didn't call Q1 2022 (-2.00%), Q2 2022 (-0.6%) a recession even though both quarters were negative. So even 2 back-to-back negative quarters is not always enough. But +1.6%, +2.8%, +2.5% oughtta do the trick I guess. (Maybe they are secretly warning Powell about the unfolding disaster).

And 4.3% unemployment rate -- almost all my (long, sigh) adult life, 4.3% was seen as a super-duper number to aspire to. Now, I guess we're supposed to post about how bad it is.