Good morning.

Stocks are up this morning and people who are paid (and handsomely at that) to provide reasons claim it is Trump’s choice of Treasury Secretary behind the move. Whether or not that is correct, few investors will argue … as the S&P, Dow and the even the small cap focused Russell 2000 achieved new intraday records before settling down a bit.

Some voices, however, are quietly pointing toward a worrisome sign … as the yield curve inverted once again … which is often claimed to be a sign of a recession-to-come … ignoring the inaccuracy of its last forecast.

The resurrection of inflation does have a few worried due.

To begin, and pointed out in the first article below, millennials appear poised and ready to “spend big” during the upcoming holiday season.  Heck, I’m not a millennial and I have already overspent my own holiday budget … as I found many of the Black Friday sales too tempting to pass up … as I try to figure just where I am going to put my new pizza oven.

Putting such purchasing plans into projections, Daily Shot reports economists significantly raised spending forecasts for 2025 … and Goldman Sachs moved slightly higher than consensus.

By the way, one thing people seem to continue to be buying are electric vehicles … as Cox Automotive reports 9% of all vehicles purchased in the third quarter were electric.  I feel this will only grow even as games are being played with incentives.

I’ll end this here as I have work being done at my house today and tomorrow and there are people running all around me and asking me questions to which I have no intelligent answers.

I just wanted to finish by pointing out one good news; bad news article … as Bloomberg is reporting crime to be down (hooray!) except for a very sharp rise in one area … shoplifting!  This is insane. I even ran into Target the other day for my kid and the pair of socks we were looking for were locked up, resulting in the need to locate a hiding employee to “unlock” the cage.

Shoplifting?

Yes, shoplifting.

It seems that even the criminals have started their Christmas shopping early.

Have a great day,

Joseph G. Witthohn, CFA

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