Wholesale Inventories: Marijuana Plants

Posted 2009-08-11 10:09
by Karl Denninger
in Macro Factors

The green shoots are in fact marijuana plants and the media has been smoking them.

Month/over/month inventories down 1.7%, annual y/o/y down 10.8%.

Durables down 1.5%, annual down 10.4%.

I am especially interested in the internals of this report, particularly, paper goods as these are a good indicator of packaging demand, along with metals (industrial demand.)

Those numbers are just plain nasty: Paper was down 2.7% m/o/m while metals were down 6.2% m/o/m.

The sales numbers weren't any better:

Sales. The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that June 2009 sales of merchant wholesalers, except manufacturers’ sales branches and offices, after adjustment for seasonal variations and trading-day differences but not for price changes, were $313.1 billion, up 0.4 percent (+/-0.7%)* from the revised May level, but were down 21.0 percent (+/-1.4%) from the June 2008 level.

Yowza.

Note the sampling error on the monthlies - we're inside the uncertainty, which means that basically the number was flat. But the annual change is just plain nasty, given that we were well into the recession (according to the NBER) last summer, and as such were well down the demand curve.

There's nothing in this report to indicate that "the recession is easing."

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