Black Friday: High Expectations on Healthy Economy

Friday, November 29, 2024

It’s Black Friday: the traditional day among retailers where holiday sales season begins and companies can put away the red ink on their ledger through the remainder of the year. This weekend appears to have gotten off to a good start, with online sales on Thanksgiving Day having gathered a better-than-expected $6.1 billion yesterday. Black Friday is anticipated to bring in $12+ billion in sales today.

U.S. sales in stores for the biggest in-store shopping day of the year, are expected to grow nearly +10% year over year to $10.8 billion. An estimated 131.7 million people are expected to start their holiday shopping today, a full +70% of all holiday shoppers. Average spending per customer today is expected to reach an eye-opening $300.

These are all quite healthy numbers. Pre-market futures are positive at this hour, although down from highs earlier this session. For the trading week, the Dow is up +0.57% so far, the S&P 500 is +0.14%, the Nasdaq +0.35% and +0.43% on the small-cap Russell 2000. Ahead of today’s open, the Dow is +100 points, the S&P +10, the Nasdaq +37 and the Russell +16 points.

PCE Results Wednesday: Steady as She Goes

In a normal week at the end of a calendar month (and this is the final trading day of November), we’ll see Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) for the previous month. It’s the preferred gauge of inflation for Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s committee, which meets again mid-December.

October PCE came in as expected on month over month headline (+0.2%), core month over month (+0.03%), headline year over year (+2.3%) and core year over year (+2.8%). The monthly data is also in-line with prior-month prints, while the year-over-year numbers are +10 basis points (bps) on each.

This speaks to a steady economy with inflation levels flat to lukewarm. It also expects to have gotten the Fed’s attention in terms of setting interest rates. The dot-plot as of this recent cutting trend says we’ll come down another 25 bps on December 18th; as of now — with plenty more inflation and employment data to come between now and then — we can still expect this, to bring the Fed funds rate to a range of 4.50-4.75%. Where we go from there, however, is very much in question.

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