Monday, December 11, 2017
"It's the hap- happiest season of all."
While holidays don't make everyone happy, investors should be feeling festive. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index is up more than 18 percent year-to-date. The Dow Jones Global ex U.S. Index is up about 21 percent year-to-date (refer to the table), and Treasury bond yields are lower than they were at the start of the year.
In addition, the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX), a measure of how unpredictable investors expect the S&P 500 Index to be over the short-term, finished the week below 10. A low VIX reading means investors expect calm markets through the end of the year.
Some are wary of the optimism that pervades markets, though. Barron's wrote:
"In fact, everything's going well right now – really well…The Citigroup U.S. Economic Surprise Index – a metric designed to measure the extent to which economic data have been beating or missing expectations – is near its highest level since January 2014, a sign of just how smoothly everything's been going. The problem is that once the data have been surprising by this much, for this long, it gets hard for good news to provide much more of a boost…"
There was a disappointing piece of economic news last week concerning wages. Unemployment has fallen to a 17-year low (4.1 percent), and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at 2.6 percent, an all-time low. It appears demand for labor is high and supply is low. That should translate into higher wages, but it hasn't yet. Average hourly earnings are up 2.5 percent year-on-year. That's an improvement on October, but not much of one.
A lot of folks are scratching their heads wondering when inflation is going to move higher. The Fed has been expecting it to happen for a while. Maybe 2018 will be the year.