A Record Trade Deficit Is Not Winning – Ep. 404
The Peter Schiff Show Podcast
Peter Schiff
4.6 • 5.9K Ratings
🗓️ 26 October 2018
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
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Merchandise Trade Deficit Largest Trade Deficit on Record
Today's rally had to overlook the bad news that came out today. I was watching CNBC this morning just before the news was announced and the anchor said, "We've got a lot of news coming out at 8:30 and I am going to go over the news items in order of importance. The first news item was the Durable Goods numbers (+0.8%), and then they went over the weekly jobless claims (202,000) and wholesale inventories (+1%). That was it. That was all they reported. They left out the most important number that came out at 8:30, which was the Merchandise Trade Deficit ($26 billion - largest trade deficit on record). But as far as CNBC is concerned, the trade deficit is immaterial. It doesn't even matter what the trade deficit is. In a way, they are right. because the markets couldn't give a damn.
People Don't Recognize that the Trade Deficit is a Bad Thing
At one point in time, the trade deficit was the most important number that came out every month. It was more important than the Non-Farm Payroll number. That's when people were smart enough to recognize that a trade deficit is actually a bad thing. But Donald Trump has made the trade deficit a big part of his Presidency. It was a big part of his campaign. You would think that maybe CNBC would consider the trade deficit important enough to even mention. If they were presenting the numbers in order of importance, at least mention it 4th, but they don't even mention it at all. That's how unimportant the trade deficit is.
Durable Goods Up Only Because of Defense Spending
But the Durable Goods number that came out (+0.8%) was reported as a good number because it was a beat. They were looking for -.5%. But the main reason that the headline beat was because of military orders - defense spending: aircraft. But if you take all that stuff out and you just looked at core capital goods, they were looking at an increase of .5% and we got a decrease of .1%. So the only reason the number went up is because the U.S. government took on more debt to buy more military equipment.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Peter Schiff Show. |
| 0:08.8 | We got a rally in the stock market today. |
| 0:11.5 | Of course, everybody is once again excited that the lows are in just because we had a rally |
| 0:16.9 | as if bear markets don't have rallies. |
| 0:19.9 | They do. |
| 0:20.9 | That is the characteristic of every bear market. |
| 0:23.6 | They fall a slope of hope. |
| 0:25.1 | They have to have these big rallies just to convince people not to sell. |
| 0:29.3 | To get people to think that it is just a correction. |
| 0:32.1 | That is probably what we had today. |
| 0:33.5 | The Dow was up about 400 points on the close. |
| 0:37.1 | Getting back maybe about two thirds of what it lost yesterday. |
| 0:41.0 | The Nasdaq also up about almost 3% just over 200 points. |
| 0:47.4 | But remember, it lost 4.5% yesterday. |
| 0:50.8 | It didn't even recover all of yesterday's losses. |
| 0:54.6 | It is just a rally. |
| 0:56.1 | Nothing has changed. |
| 0:57.6 | In fact, we got some stocks that reported after the bell that disappointed. |
| 1:02.0 | Google came out with bad numbers. |
| 1:04.9 | It has already surrendered in the after market. |
| 1:08.3 | Everything that it gained during today's session, the same thing with Amazon, which was |
| 1:12.8 | way up, which is now down as a result of coming out with earnings that missed estimates |
... |
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