Andrew Zatlin's Blog

The Vice Index says retail spending peaks in January and then flattens. But disposable income may slow sooner. Meanwhile, consumer spending is already shifting away from luxury (an early indicator of slower consumer spending). Slower consumer spending is not...

Finally… the US industrial economy has some good news. Goods demand has stabilized and inventory drawdowns are over. As the chart of inventory shows, starting in the second half of 2015, companies began cutting down on stockpiles.

The market has ripped 5% higher in just a few weeks after Trump’s nomination. But the rally isn’t coming from the largest companies that are weighted more heavily in the S&P 500. In fact, these companies aren’t performing...

The nomination of Donald Trump triggered a major see-saw reaction in the stock market. The S&P 500 immediately capsized 4% before recovering and surging 3%. A similar swing in the market was triggered by Brexit for the same...

The consensus was overwhelmingly wrong because of accidental survey bias. It’s the difference between theory and reality, and it gets tripped up in the basics of methodology. Current approaches follow a wisdom-of-the-crowds approach where multiple predictions...

The mounting evidence about the economy and the consumer is now undeniable. For example, we’ve covered the drop in business dining and traffic in premium steakhouses Ruth’s Chris and Del Frisco. The drop in business travel from...

The global economy has been collapsing for the last 2 years. Demand for “stuff” has shrunk 10% since 2014, down to levels not seen since the recession. Just look at cargo shipments from two of the world’s largest ports.

Over the Summer, retail sales data strongly diverged from Moneyball’s Vice data: The official data pointed to a sharp burst of spending. The Vice data showed no acceleration. Recent revisions to the official data removed the surge and...

There is a lot of pent-up demand for Apple’s (NYSE: AAPL) new iPhone 7 that just released. It’s the first new model in over two years (last year’s was just a tweaked version of the old one.) We can gauge the level of the pent-up demand by...

What makes me think the economy is slowing? Because that’s what corporate America is saying. We know that there’s an industrial recession going on… even if we remove those commodity impacted sectors like materials.