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...These days, Kearney may be the only one. Tuesday, the Conference Board reported that its August consumer confidence index took a dive for the second straight month, reflecting new fears about the job market. And Thursday, the Commerce Department struck with the news that consumer spending rose by only 0.1 percent in July, down from an already anemic 0.5 percent in June. Both reports sparked triple-digit Dow selloffs on Wall Street, with Thursday?s pushing the index below 10,000 for the first time since April...
...Tuesday brings us the Conference Board's consumer confidence measure, an index distinguishable from the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment survey in two ways. The UM number is bi-monthly, the CB is monthly; and the UM is proprietary, which means some paying customer has to leak it to Reuters before we can hear about it, while the CB's numbers are free to all. (This explains why the UM number is considered slightly more credible, though for my money the reports on consumers' emotional states have been singularly useless for most of this year.) That said, folks...
...Thursday?s July CPI number is a little harder to peg, given that we?re still reading conflicting accounts of whether that was inflation or deflation looming in the shadows of last week?s PPI. The Consumer Price Index, of course, is the inflation number we can spot at the mall, and with discount wars festering across the retail scape, it?s hard to imagine July prices doing anything levitationary - at least not enough to scare Greenspan into cutting out the rate cuts August...
...Well, there it is: ten months and six Fed interest rate cuts into this slowdown, inflation is nowhere in sight. Friday, the Labor Department reported that the PPI - the Producer Price Index, which measures commodities prices - fell 0.9 percent in July, its biggest decline since August 1993 and a whole lot more than the 0.3 percent forecasters had settled on. (Those guys seem to be wrong an awful lot lately, don?t they? Maybe somebody should...
...before we go there, a word about producer prices. These are the prices of the stuff that manufacturers, processors and other value-adders pass on to retailers. (Retailers then add their own value (stores, sales help, etc.), at which point the Producer Price Index becomes the Consumer Price Index, which measures what we pay for the stuff.) In other words, the PPI is mostly about manufacturing, as well as basic stuff like food and energy - it?s supposed to spot inflation before it hits the stores...