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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: crdesign who wrote (10401)	12/13/2002 11:58:49 AM
From: Jim Willie CB	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 89467

HUI is more like a strong bullish triangle just like GOLD chart, which broke out yesterday you identified the tops ok but overlooked the rising retraction bottoms it is a smoothed chart, but gets the point across the gold miner stocks have been living in serious doubt they will catch up when gold/silver follow thru upside finance.yahoo.com^HUI&d=c&t=6m&l=on&z=b&q=l / jim

To: crdesign who wrote (10401)	12/13/2002 1:42:40 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Retail Sales - Better than Expected, But Good Enough? December 12, 2002 We have been forecasting 0.5% annualized growth in Q4 real personal consumption expenditures and today's November retail sales report does nothing to cause us to change that report - other than perhaps revise it lower. The 0.4% increase in November retail sales was right on the consensus, for a change. But its composition suggested a stronger- than-consensus increase. The Street was looking for a 0.2% rise in non-auto/truck sales whereas the reported increase was 0.5%. Unit car/truck sales, which are used in the monthly/quarterly construction of NIPA personal consumption expenditures, rose 3.2% in November. Yet that component of retail sales was reported down 0.1%. So, knowing that the auto/truck component of November NIPA consumer spending will be up, and knowing (until revised lower) that the non-auto component came in relatively strong (up 0.4% excluding building materials, that latter being part of the residential construction NIPA component), we can surmise a healthy rise in November total consumer spending. But is the rise enough for us to revise up a quarterly estimate? Negative. Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations (which is about all we are capable of doing), we come up with real consumer spending growing in the fourth quarter at an annualized rate of just 0.2% under some reasonable assumptions. Those assumptions are that unit auto/truck sales are flat in December, retail sales excluding autos and building materials increase 0.4% in December (same as November), and spending on consumer spending increases at 0.2% in November and December (the same as October). Thus, even stronger December spending than what we have assumed in this envelope exercise would still not necessarily violate our 0.5% annualized growth forecast. Our suspicion, however, is that non-auto retail sales will increase less than what is assumed for December, and so, too, will sales of autos/trucks. Maybe we are too low on services. The strength in non-auto December sales was in furniture (up 2.3%) and building materials (up 1.2%). This looks to us to have been paid for with cashed-out home equity. As we wrote on Wednesday, growth in home-equity cash-outs probably has peaked as mortgage rates have stopped falling. So, Wicks Furniture and Home Depot should not extrapolate November sales growth into the first quarter. Paul Kasriel Director of Economic Research Northern Trust