Rover’s Weekly Market Brief — 5/11/2018

Economy

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) Small Business Survey ^[6] for April found that 57% of their respondents were hiring or trying to hire, but 50% were unable to find qualified applicants. A lack of qualified workers was cited as their Single Most Important Business Problem by 22% of NFIB respondents, with especially large numbers of unfilled jobs in construction and manufacturing. The NFIB findings corresponded to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover ^[7] report, which found 6.55 million job openings in March and 5.425 million hires, leaving a gap of 1.125 million unfilled jobs. The largest increases in job openings were for professional and business services (+112,000), construction (+68,000), and transportation/warehousing/utilities (+37,000), while there were drops in job openings for manufacturing (-23,000) and finance (-10,000).

April’s wholesale prices ^[8] were up less than expected at +0.1% for services and unchanged for goods, with overall prices up +0.1%, and core prices, which exclude food and energy, up +0.2%. The yearly rate of wholesale inflation slowed from +3.0% to +2.6% for overall prices and from +2.7% to +2.3% for core prices. Service price increases were led by final demand trade services (+0.2%), which was largely based on a +0.9% increase in the price index for machinery, equipment, parts and supplies wholesale trade, and also included a +0.6% hike in transportation and warehousing services. For goods a -1.1% drop in food prices, with notable prices drops for eggs (-22.9%) and fresh vegetables (-17.8%), was offset by a +0.1% rise in energy prices and a +0.3% rise in the core prices.

Consumer prices ^[9] were also up less than expected in April, with a +0.2% overall increase and a +0.1% increase in core prices. On a yearly basis overall prices rose +2.5% vs +2.4% for March, as yearly costs increased +1.4% for food, +7.9% for energy, and 2.1% for core prices. In energy prices, gasoline was up +0.3% after a -4.9% decline in March, while electricity dropped -0.6% and natural gas dropped -0.4%. In the food category, meat prices were up +0.5%, with a -0.7% drop in pork prices helping to offset a +1.3% gain in beef and veal prices and a +7.1% increase in egg prices. Increases in core prices included shelter (+0.3%), personal care (+0.7%), and household furnishings (+0.5%), and decreases included used cars and trucks (-1.6%, largest decrease since March 2009), new vehicles (-0.5%), airline fares (-2.7%), and the first monthly decline in motor vehicle insurance (-0.2%) in the past 12 months.

Upcoming Economic Reports:

Tuesday May 15 – Retail Sales

Wednesday May 16 – Industrial Production

Earnings Calendar:

 

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Agilent Technologies (A) [10]	Home Depot (HD) [11]	Tencent Holdings (TCEHY) [12]	Walmart (WMT) [13]	AstraZeneca (AZN) [14]
Invitation Homes (INVH) [15]	Vodafone Group (VOD) [16]	Cisco- Systems (CSCO) [17]	Bayer (BAYRY) [18]	Deere (DE) [19]