{"id":2461,"date":"2007-10-31T09:13:49","date_gmt":"2007-10-31T09:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/?p=2461"},"modified":"2025-03-27T15:48:30","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T15:48:30","slug":"glad-to-be-glum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/?p=2461","title":{"rendered":"Glad to be glum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Have you noticed how every piece of US economic news is being written up bearishly? Such one-way sentiment often signals an imminent reversal. <\/p>\n<p>Take last week&rsquo;s figures on new home sales, which &ndash; incidentally &ndash; are a better guide to current housing market conditions than existing home sales, because of a shorter reporting lag. New sales rose by 4.8 % in September while the stock of unsold homes fell again to a 20 -month low. Was that the message you got from your favourite economics correspondent? Of course not. I bet he \/ she talked about sales reaching an 11-year low in August, while opining that the September rise was a bounce of the dead feline variety. <\/p>\n<p>Or consider yesterday&rsquo;s consumer confidence number for October, which &ldquo;slumped to a two-year low&rdquo; and &ldquo;raised the prospect of a marked deterioration in business conditions in sectors such as retail and consumer goods&rdquo;. Call me senile but I have no recollection of the late 2005 consumer collapse. Take a look at the chart, which plots quarterly consumer spending growth with the confidence index. Does the recent move lower look like a &ldquo;slump&rdquo; to you? The relationship is not particularly close but it is a stretch to argue that spending is about to plunge . <\/p>\n<p>GDP growth should slow in the fourth quarter but when expectations are this low it doesn&rsquo;t take much to generate a positive surprise. <\/p>\n<p><span class=\"full-image-float-none\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"width: 500px; height: 300px\" alt=\"USConsumerSpending.jpg\" src=\"\/storage\/USConsumerSpending.jpg\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you noticed how every piece of US economic news is being written up bearishly? Such one-way sentiment often signals an imminent reversal. Take last week&rsquo;s figures on new home sales, which &ndash; incidentally &ndash; are a better guide to current housing market conditions than existing home sales, because of a shorter reporting lag. New [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money-moves-markets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2461"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4770,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2461\/revisions\/4770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}