Daily Market Notes
We Derived the Unknown to 400 Million. Both Numbers We Called Known Moved Four Billion.
August printed minus 105.6 billion dollars against a minus 102.0 consensus, and the three numbers we published eleven hours ago score badly in a specific way: the services surplus we derived as a residual and read nowhere was right to 400 million at 31.0, while the goods figure we called pre-announced came in 4.0 billion away and the prior we quoted moved 4.2 — ten and ten and a half times our own error. The whole miss sits in imports, 6.67 times the export error. And we will not call the four billion a revision: the release's own basis adjustment is larger than the gap.