Friday, July 1, 2016 -- Business News

Updates

Later, 1:34 p.m. Central Time: for those who want to try their own forecasting of the GDP, see the comments below. Consider it your Common Core math lesson for the day. I lost it at "...whereas the GDP is quarterly ..."
 

Original Post

 

US construction falls almost 1 percent in May; this is the second straight, and follows the biggest drop in more than five years in April. This didn't affect the GDP forecast much:

The GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2016 is 2.6 percent on July 1, down from 2.7 percent on June 29. The forecast for second-quarter real nonresidential structures investment growth increased from –7.3 percent to –4.2 percent after this morning's construction spending release from the U.S. Census Bureau. This was more than offset by declines in the forecasts of real residential investment growth from 1.7 percent to –3.7 percent and real state and local government expenditures growth from –0.4 percent to –1.1 percent after the same release.

On the other hand, manufacturing expanded at the fastest pace in more than a year. And some are saying "the Texas oil companies have turned the corner."

Rick Newman over at Yahoo!Finance says "Tesla never should have said its cars operate on autopilot." Well, that's 20-20 hindsight, I suppose.  I suppose one could say Williams never should have entered into a merger agreement with ETE. You just know ahead of time some things are not going to turn out well. Same with BHI and Halliburton. During this administration? LOL.

The market is marginally higher at noon, but there are 380 issues on the NYSE showing new 52-week highs, vs four (4), yes, four issues hitting new 52-week lows. Some of the issues hitting new highs: ATT (a big whoop); Black Hills (BHC -- in fact, after the Brexit vote, US utilities did very, very well as a sector); CenterPoint Energy (again); Duke Energy; MDU (a huge whoop); ONEOK (wow); SRE (another big whoop); TransCanada (the Keystone pipeline people); and, Verizon.