Gavekal Capital: US Consumer Confidence And New Home Sales Make Multi-Year Highs

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

US Consumer Confidence And New Home Sales Make Multi-Year Highs

The economic data out of the US recently has been somewhat "meh" recently. It hasn't been overly encouraging but it also hasn't been disastrous. This can be seen in the Citi Economic Surprise Index where the index has been hanging out just below the zero line for most of the past two months.

Today, however, we had a strong consumer confidence number as well as a very positive new home sales release. Consumer confidence rose to 85.18 (consensus estimate was 82.2) in June which is the highest level since January 2008. The present situation component rose to its highest level since March 2008 and for the first time since the Great Recession the percentage of consumers who believe that current business conditions are good is slightly higher than the percentage of consumers who believe that current business conditions are bad.

New home sales, meanwhile, surged nearly 19% month-over-month in May to a six year high. The surge in sales brought the month's supply down to 4.5 months and the median months for sale remained steady at 3.3 months.

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