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Were the Markets Really Disappointed by September Consumption Data?
The NYT headlines tells us that: "Day After Rally, Stocks Retreat on Consumer Weakness." The problem with this story is that anyone who carefully read the GDP report yesterday would not have been at all surprised by the data on consumer spending released today. It was already included in the third quarter GDP.
Those of us who passed third grade arithmetic would look at the number reported for third quarter consumption, then subtract out the numbers on monthly consumption that the Commerce Department had already released for July and August, and voila, we would know what number the Commerce Department was going to release for September consumption.
Any Wall Street traders who were surprised by the September consumption data should be looking for a new line of work.
-- Dean Baker
COMMENTS (5)
This refers to an earlier thread about US manufacturing output:
Finally! I found where the international data are taken from: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnllist.asp, table "All countries for all years". These data are NOT adjusted for inflation. They are, within limits, useful for international comparison although PPP calculations have notorious problems. But they should not be used to study trends in time unless adjusted.
A few data points:
1970 1980 1990 2000 2008
24.2 21.1 18.1 15.8 13.0 %share of mfg
1094 1304 1537 1876 1830 billions of 2008 dollars
So mfg output in real terms did in fact decrease over the past decade.
Posted by: Anonymous | October 30, 2009 4:22 PM
My post.
Posted by: piglet | October 30, 2009 4:23 PM
The what ? Market. WTF are you talking about. There are no markets.
Like I told the SEC guy five years ago, after being taken for $0.5 million, they're criminals and so are you.
Do you think that the price of any financial security is fairly priced by an open option ?
Then you are just like all the rest of the academic fodder.
Posted by: zinc | October 31, 2009 12:55 AM
Zinc:
Que?
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