Paul Westra from Stifel didn’t just downgrade a bunch of eateries today. He’s predicting an absolute, terrifying, doom in the US economy. He cites restaurant stocks as the singular bellwether for the retail consumer. With comps heading lower, it can mean just 1 thing: recession.
“Today, we adopt a bearish outlook for restaurants as we confidently believe that, at a minimum, the simultaneous -150 basis points to -200bps deceleration of restaurant industry comps across all categories during the second quarter within our most recent Stifel Sales Survey reflects the start of a U.S. Restaurant Recession,” Westra and his team said in a note.
This doesn’t just bode ill for restaurants, but could point to trouble across the economy as a whole. A downturn in dining could be implying a U.S. recession as soon as early 2017, he said, since “restaurants have historically led the market lower during the three to six-month periods prior to the start of the prior three U.S. recessions,” Westra adds.
Since he isn’t singling out one particular area of the industry, he is downgrading shares of 11 different companies including Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., Darden Restaurants Inc., The Cheesecake Factory Inc. and Zoe’s Kitchen Inc. According to his research, industry peers are slowing down across all sub-industries. Here’s a chart with quick-service restaurants (QSR), casual dining and family dining.
A few things are at play here. Maybe it’s all the civil unrest, fear of a neighborly head chopping terrorist attack or something worse. Personally, I believe Americans have transcended food and can sustain themselves off the blood of their enemies alone. All of these predictions of doom only feed into this clamoring for more blood, as markets, tirelessly, climb higher. Very soon, the good folks over at CMG will launch a catapult attack on the Stifel HQ, infecting them with a barbarous strain of ecoli, shutting their pie holes for good.
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So under the above conditions this is the guide to Happiness.
1. Eat In-N-Out
2. Eat Mexican food
3. Eat avocado with everything
4. Go to the beach
5. Never move out of California
Sounds good
I second that
In a lower class and income neighborhood, Safeway put Chobani yogurt on sale 10 for a dollar. Great price. Normally Chobani does not sell well in the store. The shelves were wiped clean, as if a hurricane were approaching. It appears price motivated customers to buy a pershiable product they normally do not care for.
I see that kind of sale all the time at Target. Greek yogurt seems to be it these days. That Yasso frozen greek yogurt is pretty great too.
Yet the market buys up continual recession headlines
For those normalcy biased traders remove the propaganda stuffing from your head
It’s being rigorously controlled antithetical to fluorishing wealth preservation – is solely to -move it up-
You have been warned
And you were warned about this -eventual scenario- when I pointed this same thing out very early on 3 years ago l-o-l