It ain’t a recession
After market sentiment reached extreme fear last week, with some investment banks bumping up their US recession probability to 40% this year, hard economy data has calmed these fears. We will only quote three data points.
First, the US March flash PMI is the “freshest” one (yesterday), and reached 53.5 for the Composite index, a 3-month high, consistent with US GDP real growth tracking at an annualized 1.9% rate in March (the quarter tracks lower at 1.5%, because of the weaker PMI in January-February). There were some distortions linked to bad weather that were pinning Services activity down in the past two months. Manufacturing was weaker in March, but appears distorted by tariff front-loading and activity is...