💵 And So We Face The Final Curtain...

 Times of change, but the goal remains the same: fairness and freedom.

How different would the world be if everyone was aware of this? #utrustxMoney #xMoney #MultiversX #cryptopayments #crypto #Web3 pic.twitter.com/theAxx1PDl— Utrust (🔜 xMoney) (@UTRUST) April 14, 2023 

China's increasingly urgent efforts to tip its mountain of savings into the economy are running up against depositors shy of all but the safest investments, in the latest sign that weak confidence is holding back post-pandemic spending and growth.

Television pictures this week showed early-morning queues at banks in Beijing for buying treasury savings bonds, while newspapers carried stories of young investors riding trains and buses to far-flung branches seeking the highest deposit rates.

Bankers told Reuters they ran out of bonds soon after opening.

The weak consumer price rise reinforces the signals from this week's trade data suggesting domestic demand remains lacklustre, while the deflationary impulse in producer prices underlines the strains on factories - a double-whammy for the world's second-biggest economy as it tries to shake off the COVID-induced damage.

"Amid a weakening post-Covid recovery, the PBOC’s guidance to cut deposit rates, ongoing disinflation, falling market rates and the Fed signalling a potential pause, we continue to believe a PBOC policy lending rate cut is becoming more likely,"

56% plunge in first-quarter net profit, (some of which is attributable to a bad investment in Sharp), lagging forecasts in its biggest quarterly fall in three years, and said visibility for the full year was "limited"

South Korea's top government research body has cut its economic growth forecast for this year to 1.5% from its earlier view of 1.8%, saying a deeper and longer export slump than previously expected is likely to offset resilient private consumption.

 Tender rejections are getting dangerously close to an all-time low, established during the depths of the COVID lockdowns.

The low back in April 2020 was 2.57%. Today's number is 2.62%.

In a normal economy, we would be in the midst of a Spring market bounce.... pic.twitter.com/Ck80KrXxKE— Craig Fuller 🛩🚛🚂⚓️ (@FreightAlley) May 11, 2023 

An unusually broad-based downturn in goods flows that has affected even the most resilient of customer segments — consumer packaged goods and food and beverage — has freight brokers scrambling to differentiate themselves and compete for less available freight.

Tyson Foods’ stock plunged by more than 16% after it announced that it lost money in the first quarter of 2023, couldn’t manage to grow beef and pork volumes even after cutting prices and lowered its estimates for revenue growth to “flat to 1%” for the year.

According to one broker who spoke to FreightWaves, a large food conglomerate is moving 8-10% fewer loads just by consolidating smaller shipments into full truckloads; a decrease in vendor order flow was responsible for a further 5-7% reduction in volume.

ING: The April labour report shows a strong headline US payrolls figure, but major revisions really cloud the narrative on this. 

Non-farm payrolls rose 253k versus the 185k consensus, but there were a net 149k of downward revisions to the past couple of months spread pretty evenly between February and March.

Private payrolls rose 230k versus the 160k consensus, but this "beat" was completely offset by a 66k downward revision to March (123k versus 189k initially reported).

 If hiring decisions tend to lead hires by say 3-6 months, $ZIP seems to be telling us a simple story. pic.twitter.com/P90q6NcXBV— Panglossian Yield (@LevFinCynic) May 11, 2023 

"We will maintain our bonus and stock award budget again this year, however, we will not overfund to the extent we did last year, bringing it closer to our historical averages,"

 Share of credit card holders in the US falling into "serious delinquency".

Young people are struggling👇 pic.twitter.com/veXInk1yT4— Longview Economics (@Lvieweconomics) May 11, 2023 

 Lumber futures (and cash) still pressing lower as we enter peak seasonal demand.

Guess the market hasn't got the word the housing market is in recovery mode yet... pic.twitter.com/L2OQFUr3JD— Dustin Jalbert (@2x4caster) May 11, 2023 

Based on our top-down models, which assume the US economy decelerates but avoids a recession in 2023, we estimate buybacks and cash M&A will fall by 15% and 5%, respectively.

During the four recessions since 1990, cash M&A typically fell by 60% and buybacks fell by 46%.

In a recession scenario, we expect all cash spending would suffer, but primarily buybacks and cash M&A. Cash M&A and buybacks are the most volatile uses of cash.

There’s danger ahead if—when recessionary dynamics take hold—central bankers have yet to pivot. However if they do shift in time, Perkins says expect the market to behave much as it did in the early 90s, when it fell 10% and then rallied hard. And that, he says, really wasn’t so bad.

We believe that the time has come to close the trade of OW Eurozone vs the US.

... from the low last September to last week, Eurozone equities have advanced as much as 30% vs the US. We outlined two weeks ago the likely turn, and think that one should be locking in these gains, especially if our current sector and style views of more Defensive leadership keep gaining traction - Eurozone has always been a global Cyclical Value play.

The best of the improvement in Eurozone activity is likely behind us, CESI just turned negative. In contrast to potentially peaking growth momentum, ECB is likely to stay hawkish, due to persistent inflation, implying that Growth - Policy tradeoff is likely to deteriorate. The region still screens cheap, but it historically acted as a high beta play on the way down, when discounting past US recessions.

Unless China delivers a meaningful fiscal stimulus in the near term, it is unlikely that it will be a positive catalyst for European equities from here.

Order books are still full to bursting (backwards looking) despite weakening incoming orders (forward looking)

But as long as these numbers (new orders) don’t form a new trend, they support our economic picture for this year: no boom, no crash, rather a lackluster cycle.

However, this would not explain why the Dax is trading close to its historic high. A better explanation could come from the development of profits: they hit a record high in the past year.