Leading Indicator
By Mitch Berg
Thriving businesses ship things.
The nascent US recovery could falter because businesses are still reluctant to invest in new equipment and technology, the head of global delivery and logistics company FedEx has warned.
“Business investment went up somewhat in the fourth quarter but is far below what it ought to be in a cyclical recovery like this,” Fred Smith, chairman and chief executive of FedEx, told the Financial Times.
FedEx has a decent record of predicting these things. Which is the bad news.
March 12th, 2010 at 8:58 am
bad link
March 12th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
copy the link location, paste into the address bar, stick a dot between ‘www’ and ‘ft’
March 12th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
Mitch,
First, temporary hiring is up. Second, use of diesel is being tracked as a new economic indicator – perhaps you should see whether that new indicator is pointing north or south. I honestly don’t know, but I don’t use FedEx as a bell-weather – because if I did, I’d rightly be accused of cherry-picking my indicators to fit my political spin.
March 12th, 2010 at 8:39 pm
I think a good indicator would be cardboard sales. You can’t ship it until you’ve boxed it.
March 13th, 2010 at 2:29 am
And another indicator has been men’s underwear….
March 13th, 2010 at 10:02 am
sorry – that should have read an indicator has been’s the sale of men’s underwear. Apparently buying new underwear is something men hold off on purchasing during certain economic down turns, and there is a noticeable upturn in underwear sales when they improve, as an indicator of growth in the economy. More so than comparable sales of women’s under garments or children’s under clothing.
March 13th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
Here’s the EIA site.
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=mgfupus1&f=m
It doesn’t break out diesel fuel cleanly, but it appears that overall consumption, gasoline consumption, and especially asphalt consumption are really low right now vs. the past ten years.
I like the men’s underwear one, too. So if we were to wear our underwear 10% longer, the economy would collapse. :^)
March 15th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Sounds like we all agree that the Obama economy is in the shitter.