More Data To Depend On
Powell says there’s time to figure it out.
So it’s clearly an exaggeration to call the Institute for Supply Management’s Services Purchasing Managers Index for March “bad.”It did decline to its lowest level in four years, but at 51.4 it’s still above the dividing line between “expansion” and “contraction” right there at 50.
But the major indexes did surge at about the same time that data hit the tape on Wednesday, hopes raised by the release’s dovish inflation indications.
Of course, this is click-bait in service of parallelism following Tuesday’s “Stocks Sink on Good News” subject line.
And we’re still rising and falling on incoming economic data and the words Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell uses to describe it.
At the same time, the Fed Chair did say that recent data haven’t “materially changed” the overall inflation picture.
After opening April with two consecutive mixed-to-negative days Wednesday was mixed-to-positive.
It wasn’t exactly a “rebound” for stocks, but the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite managed to hold green numbers on Wednesday despite a last-hour bear attack that took the Dow Jones Industrial Average into the red.
The US dollar softened some and the yield on the 10-year US Treasury note backed up a little, reflecting a sense of softening inflation.
At the same time, however, gold was up another 1.70 percent, the biggest mover in our data box.
OK, then, we shall continue to wait and see…
