Depression not yet underway
Of hiring data, fast-fashion, the real non-substitutes, CFO sentiment soured-ish, a surfeit of broken deals, and tales from auto-lands
We were promised a ruined economy:
hiring data is (still) more of the same
Chinese fast-fashion etailers get new prices . . . and nothing happens, yet
what are the real non-substitutable imports?
how much less excited for the future are CFOs?
M&A continues to not-collapse
very little evidence of consumer front-running, except for perhaps one thing (which is probably going to get more expensive)
👉👉👉Reminder to sign up for the Weekly Recap only, if daily emails is too much. Find me on twitter, for more fun. Tariffs having some impact in the real economy? Maybe?
Based on the headlines, you’d think the Great Depression was well underway. That does not, however, appear to be the case. The hard data is still lagging.
JOLTS jobs data came out, and the story is “more of the same.”
Job openings are back to where they were in September 2024:
There are 7.1M job openings, which is about 900k less than this time a year ago.
You could look at this a few ways:
Job openings were in steady decline, but then by some miraculous reason having nothing to do with Trump, jobs started growing again after the election, but then he ruined it with Tariffs
Same thing, but Trump was responsible for “creating” the jobs in November (and now he’s ruining them)
Jobs openings were in secular decline, people got a little excited when Trump was elected because the animal spirits b like that, but now job growth has returned to the status qua ante, and certainly not helped by tariffs, but mostly unaffected (for now).
Personally, I think option #3 is most likely, but the zeitgeist seems to favor #1 (shocker).
Of course, if you’re going to blame Trump for the un-bump, then you should have to give him credit for the bump, but I don’t make the rules.
Fast-fashion gets more expensive, but still very popular
Elsewhere, the Chinese e-commerce rocketships, Temu and Shein, are now selling less cheap tchotchkes from China.
According to Bloomberg (which likely found the story on Reddit), there are some big price jumps on popular items:
The average price for the top 100 products in the beauty and health category increased by 51% from Thursday, with several of the items more than doubling in price.
For home and kitchen products and toys, the average jump was more than 30%, led by a massive 377% increase in the price of a 10-piece set of kitchen towels. For women’s clothing the rise was 8%.
Kitchen towels used to cost $1.28, but are now a staggering $6.10.
To be honest, that entire sentence contains wonders.
Anyways, that tariffs and/or closing the de minimis exemption would increase prices for Temu and Shein was pretty much inevitable. How much it matters, remains to be seen.
There is some evidence that the apps themselves are losing customers, or at least, not growing customers as quickly:
Temu and Shein dropped ~60 places on the App Store ranking, following Liberation Day.
That’s a pretty dramatic drop in the rankings, so clearly something is going on.
On the other hand, transaction data shows very little slowing for Shein, just yet.
Shein is still growing sales at a steady clip:
Shein is growing ~25%, which is about 3x faster than fast-fashion as a whole.
Shein also continues to increase its share of fast fashion spending:
Shein upped its marketshare to ~44%, up from 39% last April.
Most of Shein’s gains appear to come at Zara’s expense, while a VC-backed company Quince (that styles itself as the “opposite of fast fashion” fast fashion co) makes inroads. So, basically no change.
Clearly, Random Walk does not have strong feelings about fast fashion.
I make these observations because (a) Buying Cheap Tchotchkes on the Internet has long been an economic driver of interest, and (b) despite all the extraordinary sound and fury about tariffs, very little has actually changed (certainly relative to the sound and fury).
Great consumer slowdown? Not on Mother’s Day!
Again, if there’s some great consumer pullback, someone forgot to tell both the Easter shoppers and the Mother’s Day crowd, as well:
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