Succinct Summation of the Week's Events

Succinct Summation of the Week’s Events:

Positives,

1)Initial jobless claims were as forecasted at 222k and up 6k w/o/w though remaining still very low. Continuing claims dropped to 1.841mm from 1.878mm, though still elevated.

2)Core durable goods orders in March were as expected when we include the tweak revision to February. The headline jump of 9.2% was all due to a 139% rise in ‘nondefense aircraft’ orders.

3)New home sales in March rose to 724k from 674k and that was about 40k more than forecasted. Likely helping was the drop in mortgage rates in March that was proved short lived as they’ve risen since. A jump in sales in the South drove the m/o/m regional gain. Months’ supply fell to 8.3 from 8.9 with the transaction jump but the absolute number of homes for sale rose to 503k, the highest since 2007. Due to mix, the y/o/y home price fell by 7.5% as there was a lift in sales in the number of homes priced below $500k.

4)From Alphabet/Google: "We continued to see healthy growth and momentum across the business, including AI powering new features. In Search, we saw continued double digit revenue growth." Waymo by the way "is now safely serving over 250,000 paid passenger trips each week. That's up 5x from a year ago." Google Cloud revenue rose 28% y/o/y. "YouTube saw a similar performance across verticals.”

5)From Texas Instruments: "So more and more evidence and signals that across all channels, all geographies, a recovery of the industrial market is here." But the company doesn’t know how much is pull-forward inventory building and I assume a lot is.

6)From Verizon: "When it comes to consumer behavior, I mean, in general, we haven't seen any major consumer shifts in behavior even though we read the same articles as everybody else that consumer sentiment is coming down. Of course, we have a product, the mobility and broadband are so essential for our consumers and for our business customers because it's just so relevant. So we haven't seen that."

7)From Capital One: In light of everything going on, the CEO was glass half full. "The US consumer remains a source of strength in the economy. That's true for almost any metric that we look at. The unemployment rate is low and stable, job creation remains healthy, real wages are growing. Consumer debt servicing burdens remain stable near pre-pandemic levels. In our card portfolio, we're seeing improving delinquency rates and lower delinquency entries, and payment rates are improving on a y/o/y basis."