Recession --> Stagflation --> Disinflation --> Deflation -- November 27, 2023

Locator: 46188ECON.

I'm starting to hear the word "deflation" a lot more often the past two weeks. 

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Amazon

Link here.

Amazon.com has grabbed the crown of biggest delivery business in the U.S., surpassing both UPS and FedEx in parcel volumes.

The Seattle e-commerce giant delivered more packages to U.S. homes in 2022 than UPS, after eclipsing FedEx in 2020, and it is on track to widen the gap this year.

The U.S. Postal Service is still the biggest parcel service by volume; it handles hundreds of millions of packages for all three companies.

A decade ago Amazon was a major customer for UPS and FedEx, and some executives from the incumbents and analysts mocked the notion that it could someday supplant them.

Amazon’s outsize growth combined with strategy shifts at FedEx and UPS have changed the balance. Before Thanksgiving this year, Amazon had already delivered more than 4.8 billion packages in the U.S., and its internal projections predict that it will deliver around 5.9 billion by the end of the year. Last year Amazon shipped 5.2 billion packages.

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Black Friday

We live in a fairly nice, not-quite-high-end apartment complex, with about twenty separate buildings, each building with three floors and about thirty units in each of the twenty buildings.

It appears that 80% of tenants use Amazon on a regular basis and on any given day of two units of ten units on each floor have Amazon packages sitting at their door.

Today, Monday morning, the first "workday" after Black Friday and the story is quite different. 

"Everyone" is getting a package and many door mats have multiple Amazon boxes. It's quite startling. 

I expect to see something similar through the rest of the week.

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For The Archives

May and I try to visit the grandsons in Portland, on average, every two to three months. We travel / visit separately.

May likes to spend the holidays with the grandsons; I like to spend non-holiday dates with the grandsons.

May has just spent the last ten Thanksgiving days with the grandsons.

Levi and Judah are 3.5 years old.

Levi is the serious thinker. Judah is more fun-loving, the jokester.

This was the "message" traffic earlier today with daughter Laura and grandson Judah and Levi taking Grammy May back to the airport for her return trip to DFW, Texas. We live five minutes (driving time) to the west of the airport.

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End-Of-Year Trading: The Market

Tailwinds:

• rotation from tech to non-tech? Nope. If not, from where is the money coming to push the market higher?
  
• tax -loss harvesting: the next two weeks.
  
• cash on the sidelines, A: my favorite chart.
  
• cash on the sidelines, B: bears.
  
• FOMO:
• unsaid: 
• oil is way, way too cheap; or,
• oil is paying great dividends.