Charts Of The Day: 6 New Record Highs - U.S. Breweries, World Stock Market Cap, World Trade, World Output, U.S. Gas, U.S. Oil

1. Welcome to the Golden Age of Beer (above). The number of US breweries reached a record of more than 6,000 at the end of last year, according to the Brewers Association. That's an eye-popping three-fold increase in the number of breweries in just six years since 2011, and the 700 increase in breweries in 2017 is almost two new US breweries every day last year. Carpe humulus.

2. Global Stock Market Rally (above). According to the London-based World Federation of Exchanges, the world stock market capitalization increased more than 25% over the last year and reached a new record-high of almost $90 trillion in January. Think about it this way: It took thousands of years for the value of world stock markets to reach $45 trillion in November 2006. It then took less than 12 years for the market capitalization of world stock markets to increase by another $45 trillion at the end of last month!

3. World Trade And World Output (above) both reached new all-time monthly record highs in December 2017, according to data from CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. On a year-over-year basis, world trade (adjusted for inflation) increased by 4.6% and world industrial production (adjusted for inflation) increased by 3.9% through last December.

4. US Natural Gas Production (above) reached a new, all-time record monthly high in December of last year of nearly 3 trillion cubic feet, according to data released today by the Energy Information Administration. Carpe Naturalis Gas.

5. Weekly US Crude Oil Production (above) reached another new historical production record of 10.28 million barrels per day in the week ending last Friday (February 23) according to data released today by the Energy Information Administration. That new production record represents an increase of more than one million barrels per day from the output of 9.03 million barrels per day a year ago. Peak what? Carpe oleum.

Comments

[User 21793061]

Oil weeklies are 95% a model and 5% data. They take the STEO FORECAST and just construct weekly estimates by linearly interpolating the STEO monthly FORECAST. The only new data in there is the AK pipe flow (~500 M bpd).

Weeklies are also never revised for bad old values (so it is not a curated time series). Instead each week is just a best guess, really a forecast of current production. There are big jumps on a monthly basis when new (2 month old) data from the 914 is obtained and changes the STE forecasting.

For all these reasons, it is a bad idea to show weekly values as a time series or even to cite recent weekly numbers as an EIA report (as if it were survey data). The 914 report and resultant time series is what you should plot instead. I have told this to Perry before but he just repeats the error (to the extent of doing advocacy, not analysis). He might have the same politics as Milton F., but not anything like some analytical rigor.