This morning’s key economic report was retail, and it was a bit of a whiplash for futures. The core retail month over month figure was expected to be +0.2% but was instead -0.1%. They also had to update the prior month’s figure lower since it was, ya know, totally made up out of whole cloth.
The overall retail sales figure was also very weak at one-third the expected value with, once again, the prior month having to be revised lower since it was completely incorrect.
For a moment, the market embraced the withering economy as good news, sending equities spiking higher, as shown below with the /RTY futures. As of this writing, the /ES and /RTY are both red (but just a little) while the /NQ is holding on to a few hundredths of a percentage point of gain.
The bonds themselves, however, are hanging on to the gains, based on the idea that the economy does, in fact, suck, which will allow the Fed the opportunity to nudge interest rates 0.25% as a gift to Biden before they have to raised rates a couple of hundred basis points next year.
Of course, none of this matters, since the only organization on the planet of any important is Nvidia. Just before the opening, NVDA is actually just lolling around, not doing much of anything.
It’s no great wonder that Nvidia is worth $3.2 trillion, however. Let’s face it, if your family is anything like mine, most of our expenses are Nvidia products. I drive my Nvidia car to the Nvidia store where I picked up a dozen fresh Nvidia GPUs along with some Nvidia bread, Nvidia ground beef, and Nvidia parmesan cheese. Once my wife gets home from her job at Nvidia Textiles, we enjoy a nice meal together with some red wine from Jensen Vineyards and catch up on our favorite Netflix comedy series, Livin’ with the Huangs, which is about the fanciful antics in the earliest days of the company’s founding.
So the $3.2 trillion? That’s just a start.
