Business Inventories from May Try to Budge the Trend

Business inventories data for the month of May have been released this morning. May was brought along with a 0.1% gain, matching the Bloomberg consensus estimate of 0.1% and a tad higher than the Dow Jones consensus of being flat for the month. Today's business inventories news report compares to most reports pegging it as being up 0.3% in April and down 0.1% in March.

We have seen other reports that are more current, so this one might not be as important in a ranking of economic reports. Business inventories are the total dollars inventories held by manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers.

Again, with this now being mid-July, we are not assigning a very high weighting to this report as it is reflecting data from May, and that makes it more than six weeks old.

The markets have had to digest data after several days of big upside gains, so we are still lower this morning, even after the inventories report. The S&P 500 is down by less than a point and the DJIA is down less than five points. We also have the yield on the 10-year Treasury note at 2.57%.

Filed under: Economy