Wait'll we see Q101 numbers and see if the recession was the bitter pill we needed to stave off that 2 - 3% inflation. Multi-billion companies do not even have approved budgets yet for 2001, and it's the second week of February! Those are normally approved by year end of the previous year. No budget = no spending. They are putting it off until March or second quarter.
John Chambers of Cisco nailed it when he said that Greenspan and company look at data that's a month or more old. Next week's PPI and CPI will represent data that's, on the average, from mid-January. That's what AG looks at. OTOH, companies like Cisco, Intel and Dell, who do probably half their business on the Internet, have actual results, expenses, etc. on their Intranets, so that the CEO can look on his own PC and see what it looks like up to the last 24 hours. We hit a wall in early December, and AG and co. didn't see it until January. He could have asked the CEOs of those three or dozens of other bellwether companies.
Sorry, IMO, the outmoded Fed has thrown us into a full blown recession. Sorry for all of us because of what stocks will end up looking like at their bottoms yet to come.
Tony |
