By Greg Peel<\/p>\n
What’s going on in the US economy? No one seems to know.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday the Dow Jones had another go at the 12,000 mark when, lo and behold, September housing starts were up \u2013 yes up \u2013 5.9%, following the August number of down 4.9%. Hooray! And there we were thinking there was a housing crisis! The Dow surged about 90 points and 12,000 looked like history.<\/p>\n
Then out came housing permits \u2013 down 6.3% in September. “Permits” are required before you can make a “start”, meaning the permits number leads the starts number by one to two months. Groan.<\/p>\n
There was also news that consumer prices had fallen 0.5% in September. Hooray! And there we were thinking the Fed was really worried about inflation. But it turns out year-on-year core inflation was up 2.9%. Groan.<\/p>\n
The Dow slipped back some 50 points in the afternoon, failing to set a close above the magical 12,000 mark.<\/p>\n
While all this has been going on, US companies have continued their quarterly reporting. Last night tech stocks were generally strong again, and a surprisingly good result was posted by Coca-Cola. The Dow burst through the barrier again. Would it hold this time?<\/p>\n
No.<\/p>\n
All eyes were on the Philadelphia Fed manufacturing activity number. Why is such a specific figure important? Because last month it was negative for the first time in a very long time, and this spooked the market. This time the market expected a positive.<\/p>\n
It was disappointed. The index figure fell from minus 0.4 in August to minus 0.7 in September, against expectations of a 7.8 rise. To top things off, the oil price, which has been bouncing around most nights lately, bounced up again on more Saudi cut back talk. Once again, the Dow slipped.<\/p>\n
But it recovered, and more positive reporting finally saw the Dow stumble over the line to close at 12,011 \u2013 up 19 on the day.<\/p>\n
The gold price was stronger on the back of the oil price, and a weaker US dollar sparked by the Philly number. The US dollar appears trapped in a range of 1.25 to 1.29 against the euro at present, so a breakout could well prove significant. Gold is trying hard to attack the US$600\/oz level, although it is still rather fragile. It finished in New York at US$598.80 bid last night, but the bellwether Comex contract did close above the US$600\/oz mark for the first time in a while.<\/p>\n
Base metal prices were generally stronger, and all up overnight. SPI traders factored in a return to the positive in Australia today, with the December contract closing up 22 points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Dow closed above 12,000 for the first time last night as profit season took the limelight from otherwise confusing economic data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52383"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}