I am at the Financial Advisor magazine Innovative Alternative Strategies symposium today and tomorrow, where I will be sitting on the Chief Investment Officer panel. I will therefore be spending most of the day in sessions that I will talk about in later posts. That, combined with a relatively slow weekend in the news, makes this post a bit shorter than usual.
The headlines over the weekend dealt with the start of the Olympics and the slowdown of the U.S. economy to 1.5 percent. Not much to comment on, except to note that, although growth has slowed, it remains higher than many, including myself, had expected at the start of the year.
There is no real meta-story in today’s papers—each of them has a different focus. The Wall Street Journal hits the U.S. economy hard, with “Corporate Profit Streak Faces a Threat” on the front page, “Dollar’s Strength Eats Into Corporate Bottom Line” on page A2, “Federal Spending Cutbacks Slow Recovery” on page A5, “Stunted Growth for Earnings Season” on page C1, and “Fed Eases Toward More Unconventional Action” on page C8. Sense a theme here?
The New York Times does not hit on the U.S. economy today. It does have a light focus on Europe in the business section, with “After Pledge of Help for Euro, Pressure Is On for Bank Chief” on page B1 and “Leaders Extend Stay in Greece to Work Out Latest Cuts” on page B3. Nothing particularly new here.
Today’s Financial Times hits briefly on both the U.S. and Europe with “Tough to dig US economy out of a hole” and “Schauble view on eurozone at odds with US.”
I suspect that we are moving into the August lull—when both market participants and reporters go on vacation—and that this is being reflected in the headlines. Either that, or things are calming down. As much as I would like the latter to be the case, I don’t think it is. We will see what the headlines say tomorrow.
Have a great day!