With so much riding on the American “consumer” – given the collapse of the US manufacturing industry and massive mal-investment over-stocking falsely signaled by The Fed's “help” – one wonders just what happens next as the Services economy begins to roll over and the gap between the consumer and industrial America – which has never, in over 30 years, been wider – converges back to a new normal dystopia.
It's different this time…
And while Goldman desperately does not want to admit reality, they are forced to… but manage to find a possible silver lining…
The industrial and non-industrial parts of the economy have recently disconnected for only the third time in the past 40 years.
The Current Activity Indicator (CAI) represents a real-time proxy of economic activity. Like GDP, the CAI may be sub-divided into components. Industrial and non-industrial measures of activity are usually highly correlated. The gap reflects the collapse in oil prices and drag on industrial activity.
The most analogous precedent is 1986 when crude prices dropped by 70% in six months and industrial demand plummeted. However, during that episode the consumer remained healthy and continued to spend, the US avoided a recession, and equities climbed. A similar pattern may occur in 2016.
So now that comparisons with 1998 are thrown out of the window, the last saving grace is whether it is 1986… but we all know what happened after that (as reality once again set in)…
