Last week's suffocating tedium on Wall Street may have seemed like prelude to yet another boring and eventless summer, but we all know better. There are too many stalking monsters out there for the next three months to pass quietly. Real estate values can only continue to fall, except perhaps in the realm of argument, and energy prices to rise. Gasoline looks like it's headed seasonally above $4 a gallon no matter what happens on the futures exchanges, and it's possible that by September we'll look back on $4 regular with nostalgia. Will we feel nostalgia as well for a recession that remained statistically deniable even with real estate prices deflating more rapidly, as they in fact have been, than during the Great Depression? The pundits seem to be growing increasingly confident in predicting there will be no recession. Make a mental note of who these Pied Pipers are, since we wouldn't want to lose track of them six months from now when they attempt to scurry back into the hive of anonymity. Most recently, they drum-rolled an upward revision in first quarter GDP as reason to infer that the worst is past for the U.S. economy. GDP growth for Q1 was originally reported as 0.6%, but a downward revision in inventories allowed the Commerce Department to nudge the figure up to 0.9%. We see little cause for celebration in this, however, since, like the surreal employment data that we are fed each month, inventory figures seem all too easy to manipulate. Born-Again Savers To get a better idea of what's going on, we'd suggest watching corporate profits and consumer spending. The former fell 6.8% in the first quarter, while the latter grew a feeble 1.0% -- well below the 2.5% pace of the fourth quarter. Whence will the inevitable collapse
LATEST TRADES
