Hello my friends, today is September 7th and this is Markets Weekly. So this past week was a pretty red-weakened markets. We had notable declines in all major equity market indexes. Now last week we were wondering if we would just blast off to new all-time highs or if we would double-top and it looks like we have the answer. Today let's talk about three things. First, we have to talk about the most important data point the past week, the non-forms perils print but let's also talk about a number of other indicators that suggest a weakening US labor market.
Secondly, let's talk a little bit about Australia and Canada. Two countries that are similar in some key respects but on the one hand, the Bank of Canada has cut rates for the third time in the past week but the Reserve Bank of Australia has yet to cut rates at all. Let's talk about what might be driving that difference. And lastly, so a few days ago President Trump floated the idea of a US sovereign wealth fund and now reports are indicating that team Biden is running with the idea. Let's talk about why a US sovereign wealth fund is a ridiculous idea.
Okay, starting with the labor market. Now before we get into the really big non-forms perils print, let's talk about a number of other surveys on the labor market that together are suggesting that the US labor market is decelerating pretty quickly. First, let's look at Joltz. Joltz is basically the number of job openings in the US. Now we can see during the pandemic area, job openings absolutely surged as companies scrambled to find workers and were increasing wages rapidly to try to entice people to join their company.
But over the past year, you can see that a number of job openings has steadily declined and the most recent Joltz print was lower than expected. Separately, let's look at the Challenger report. The Challenger is another survey where they ask a whole bunch of companies about their intentions when it comes to hiring and firing workers. One thing that stood out to me in the most recent Challenger survey is this, that the hiring tensions of companies are the lowest it's ever been according to the survey.
But at the same time though, note that whereas firing intentions picked up a bit the past month they are seasonally where you would expect them to be. One thing that stood out to me though is the firing intentions for tech. Now it looks like there really is a white collar recession where white collar workers are having a harder time getting jobs than blue collar workers are reversed from the way it's been the past few years. Another popular survey is the S&P PMI index where they survey a whole bunch of companies when it comes to say their judgment on business conditions, hiring and so forth.
Now the most recent services PMI shows that services companies in the US continue to expand. Now that is of course in line with what we saw in the GDP data where the most recent second quarter of GDP was revised upwards from 2.8% to 3%. Companies continue to expand. However though in the most recent PMI survey they also note that the hiring component is the weakest it's been in three months. Now the last survey that I want to look at is the Fed's beige book.
Now the Fed actually has a very very extensive intelligence gathering operation where they talk with businesses big and small throughout the country to get a sense qualitatively what the businesses are doing. Now according to the latest beige book survey companies are not really firing anyone but they're also not really hiring anyone and they continue to view business conditions as pretty uncertain so they're not really sure what they should be doing.
Now taking all this data into account it's pitting a picture that whereas we don't have a lot of companies firing people and again that's consistent with the weekly job unemployment claims not really spiking but also they're not really hiring a lot of people. So they are moderating their plans but continuing to expand. That brings us to the most recent non-forms payroll sprint. Now the headline print was a bit softer than expected but still showed over 100,000 jobs created last month. What stood out to me looking into the details was the unemployment rate decline from 4.3% to 4.2% which is really good news because oftentimes when we see an increase in the unemployment rate it tends to continue to increase and sometimes rapidly.
Now again the labor market to be clear is slowing but not yet sending recessionary signals. When we have a recession we don't create 100,000 jobs a month we lose 100,000 jobs a month and we see GDP contract whether they expand at a 3.0% annual rate but we are heading into a direction where it is possible in the coming months we could slow enough to tip into recession. Now the equity market seems to be looking at all this labor market data and becoming increasingly concerned of a potential recession in which case equity prices usually go down sometimes by a lot. The interest rate markets are looking at this in pricing in pretty significant fed cuts.
We had important fed speakers on Friday and they seem to be open to the idea of larger than expected cuts but not right away and so the market right now is pricing in a 25 basis point cut in September and probably larger cuts in November or December and that could happen depending on how the data evolves at the moment though I think it really is just whatever the data brings. So let's watch that closely in the coming weeks.
Okay the next thing that I want to talk about is Australia and Canada. Two countries that are similar in many respects but have had very different monetary policies. So how are they similar? Well first off again they are English speaking countries that are you know share Anglo heritage like the US and they are similar in size with Canada being a bit bigger. Now some of their policies though are also very similar so both countries have had tremendous amounts of migration in the past few years notably from India where in one year their population increased by almost 3% almost entirely from migration both in Canada and in Australia. And these countries are heavy in resources extraction and also home to tremendous tremendous surges in home prices and like the rest of the world they also experienced high inflation.
So we've talked about Canada before over the past few years we saw CPI in Canada surge but over the past year also come down significantly and so much so that the Bank of Canada cut rates for the third time last week no surprise looking at their inflation numbers they are very close to 2% and they've also been seeing notable rises in their unemployment rate. Now overall Canadian GDP continues to grow but that is often masking a per capita recession where the GDP is merely growing because you're adding more people on a per capita basis GDP in Canada has been shrinking for a few quarters and so many people are feeling squeezed. But thankfully though the rate cuts are helping a lot of people because a lot of mortgages in Canada are renewed every few years in a sense it's kind of like having a floating rate mortgage and as interest rates go down more and more Canadian families are able to renew their mortgages at levels or lower than let's say the 5 and 6% they would be at not too long ago.
Now moving to Australia even though there are similar macro factors the Reserve Bank of Australia actually hasn't cut rates at all. In fact not too long ago there were whispers of further rate hikes. Now looking into the inflation data in Australia it's clear that the Reserve Bank of Australia is not cutting because inflation remains high at 3.9% again much higher than their inflation target. Looking into the components of inflation similar to Canada a big part of their inflation is driven by rents where when you increase the population significantly of course that creates immense demand for housing and all sorts of other services like hospitals, education and so that also drives up services inflation. So in a sense similar to Canada their inflation is largely the result of their macroeconomic immigration policies.
Now strangely though why has the inflation come down so quickly in Canada but not as quickly in Australia. Now one reason for this that's being floated around is that the interest rates in Australia actually did not increase as aggressively as they did in Canada. Looking at the policy rates for the two countries you can see that you know the Bank of Canada raised rates super aggressively and has begun cutting them whereas the Reserve Bank of Australia didn't rise didn't high-rate as much and just kind of kept it there and it's possible that they did not raise rates high enough. Another possibility is that Canada being much closer to the US again tremendous amounts of supply chains and so forth maybe it's just easier to get the supply side down but I think it's pretty interesting to see how these two countries have similar in many respects but such a different pathways when it comes to monetary policy and right now the market is thinking that maybe the RBA would cut later on but obviously when inflation is at 3.9 percent you probably shouldn't be doing that.
Okay the last thing that I want to talk about is the idea of a US sovereign wealth fund. Now this idea has been floating around by President Trump a few days ago and now there's a Bloomberg article suggesting that they are influential people in the Biden administration who are actually trying to put this together. Now this is a really strange idea because well first let's think about why countries usually have sovereign wealth funds. Let's look at for example Norway which has a tremendous tremendous sovereign wealth fund of more than 1.5 trillion dollars. Now why does Norway have a sovereign wealth fund? Well the country owns a whole bunch of oil and the government sells that oil and it earns a whole bunch of money and what do they do with that money? Well they decide to just put it in this sovereign wealth fund that in turn invests in stuff throughout the world with the notion that you know eventually one day this oil is going to run out or maybe we transition into a economy that requires less oil so right now we have this windfall let's be responsible and invest this money so that future generations of new regions can benefit from it. So this ginormous ginormous sovereign wealth fund of Norway what do they do with it? What do they invest in? Well actually if you look at their largest holdings again they hold equities fixed income real estate clean energy stuff looking at their equity holdings they're largest holdings. Now to get this is a Norwegian corona to get that into dollars divided by 10.7. So basically the largest holdings are basically max seven stocks so and to be clear they've done very well with max seven holdings.
So the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund has a bunch of oil money buys a bunch of US stocks buys a bunch of US Trejories as well in real estate throughout the world but it makes sense obviously they have a lot of extra money. Now another common way that people have a sovereign wealth fund is that their country earns a lot of money through trade. Now let's look at the case of China. As we all know China is the workshop of the world. Chinese businesses are very good at manufacturing things and they sell stuff sell to countries throughout the world and they earn more in foreign currency than they import. So they export more than they import and so they have all this foreign money largely dollars left over. So what do they do with all this foreign currency? Well the Chinese government invests it. Now a lot of it is in things like Trejories kind of safe assets but we also know that the Chinese government has been investing this throughout projects throughout the world say in Africa through things like the Belt and Road Initiative in part to build political goodwill but also in part to diversify their exposure to the US government. So they have a lot of extra money that they earn through trade and then they go and they invest that elsewhere.
Now let's look at the US. Does the US have tremendous amounts of natural resources? Absolutely except that it does not belong to the US government or at least the US government is not exploiting it. So there's no huge oil fund, oil revenues that the US government has. What about does the US earn a whole bunch of foreign currency from their overseas exports? Actually it doesn't. The US is famous for having a current account deficit so every year they import a lot more than they export so that's money flowing out of the country to the tune of hundreds of billions. So obviously the US government does not have excess money to invest so where would the money for a sovereign wealth fund come from? Well it would probably come from the same place all US government spending comes from. They would just print a bunch of treasuries and use that to finance the sovereign wealth fund.
Now reporting from team Biden suggests that the rationale for having a sovereign wealth fund is to invest in strategic things, be it resources or cutting edge technology and basically help in the geopolitical great power competition. Now that's kind of strange to me because it seems like the US government is already doing that right? Every year the US has a tremendous fiscal deficit, a lot of that goes into things like defense and subsidies to all sorts of industrial projects. So in a sense the US is already spending a lot of money achieving those very same goals. Defense department obviously events in all sorts of private sector companies to try to get technology and so forth.
Now how is having a sovereign wealth fund different from let's say just what we're doing right now appropriating money through Congress? And I think the key difference again remember the US doesn't actually have extra money to invest it would be just another way to have more government spending except outside of the purview of Congress. Right now if you want to come if you have a company or if you are a special interest and you want to get money you have to go and lobby your congressman and maybe Congress passed legislation and basically print treasuries to finance your your handout.
If we would have if we were to have a sovereign wealth fund now going forward special interests or whatever companies that want to have government money maybe they won't have to go through Congress maybe they can go through whoever is governing the sovereign wealth fund instead. In a sense it would give the executive or however the sovereign wealth fund is governed access to a piggy bank that they can then dole out to their friends or maybe even two things that they think are important. So it seems like a US sovereign wealth fund doesn't make sense unless you want to have more government spending outside of the purview of Congress basically without checks and balances.
So to me that that seems like a bad idea and a way to circumvent our our political system. So hopefully there will not be any sovereign wealth fund and to be clear the US does not need one. If you have the reserve currency whenever you need to buy something you do it the way that the government already does you just print treasuries.
All right so that's a lot prepared thanks so much you're tuning in if you liked the video remember to like and subscribe and of course if you're interested in hearing my thoughts check out my blog at fedguy.com or learn more about macro markets on my online courses at centralbanking101.com.