The DC Today - Monday, July 17, 2023

The Dividend Cafe

The Dividend Cafe - The Bahnsen Group

Business, Estate Planning, Monetary Policy, Wealth Management, Investing, Macro Economics, Dividend Growth Investing, Retirement Planning

4.9 • 572 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2023

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today's Post - https://bahnsen.co/3Q15Bql

Economic Front

One of the economists I read every day who has been screaming non-stop for 18 months now that we are entering a recession sent a “reminder” email this morning that we are “still likely” to enter a recession. And maybe we are. First of all, broken clocks and all that stuff. But secondly, I think the question about if and when we enter a recession now misses the point. Short term, these people obviously don’t know. Additionally, no one knows what it would mean to markets if we did. No one. But longer term, we don’t need to know if there is a Q4 2023 or a Q1 2024 recession to know that we do face significant excessive indebtedness that matters for the next 10, 20, 30 years. I remain mystified by why these chicken littles can’t focus on a long term reality we do know versus a short term reality we do not.

Consumer confidence jumped to 72.6 from 64.4 last month in the latest University of Michigan Consumer Confidence survey. This is the highest since September of 2021. Current conditions and expectations were both higher. Two quick caveats: (a) I have always found consumer confidence to be worthless; (2) Pre-COVID it was at 101, so putting the index in perspective, it is ahead of expectations, ahead of recent prints, and yet well below prior level.

China’s Q2 GDP growth missed expectations, coming in at +6.3% year-over-year but slowing to just 0.8% from Q1’s growth rate (which had been +2.2%(, which was a surprise. Retail sales are not huge, capex is muted (as their property sector stumbles), and youth unemployment is over 21%.

Links mentioned in this episode: TheDCToday.com DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the DC Today, your daily market synopsis of the Dividing Cafe, brought to you every Monday through Thursday to bring you up-to-date information and perspective on financial markets.
0:14.7	Well, hello and welcome to the Monday edition of the DC Today. I am recording from our house out in East Hampton. I just got in
0:24.8	a couple of hours ago, very busy weekend in the city after a week of travel and a lot of
0:32.7	research today. I'm kind of excited about the DC Today Monday is always intended to be a little longer,
0:40.0	the written version. I sort of follow a template that I had created in the aftermath of COVID
0:45.9	and Markets.com, for those of you that remember that. And we go through market action and
0:52.2	public policy and the Fed and economic data,
0:56.8	you know, just these different categories that we used to kind of write off of.
1:00.6	And so all of that is stuff we're going to go through right now.
1:04.2	And then the Ask David where we have real life questions.
1:08.1	They're never made up at all.
1:09.4	It's real questions from readers that we try to
1:11.9	answer one every day. And today we have two. I want to go through that a little as well. The Monday
1:17.2	edition also has a special call. And we do call it against doomsdayism. And the attempt there is to
1:26.3	just highlight some different factoid, some reinforcement of the fact that, in fact, the world is not ending,
1:33.7	and that we have various empirical support indicating that Doomsday is sort of a different interpretation of the way the things are going versus reality
1:48.1	that indicates an awful lot of improvement for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
1:53.6	So we will do all that today.
1:56.4	And I just wanted to kind of reinforce what the Monday edition is about.
2:00.4	Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we're going to continue using DC today to give market updates
2:04.5	and ask David and any other kind of market factoid or news of the day that is relevant.
2:13.0	Very often, I'm the one bringing that to you.
	...

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