No, The Article Title Isn't A Typo

New Northern Trust Unit Targets Wealthy Gays

Article published on January 5, 2011

Northern Trust is adding a new practice to its wealth management services that it says will meet the needs of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders and “non-traditional” families. So reports the Chicago Tribune.

John McGowan, the national practice leader for the new unit and formerly a senior relationship manager in Northern Trust’s wealth management group, says the move recognizes that the “definition of family has evolved.”

McGowan says Northern Trust has helped LGBT clients develop wealth management strategies for decades. He says the bank has “the experience to deal with unique legal, tax and wealth transfer challenges.”

Northern Trust, the largest bank in Chicago, piloted the unit in that city over the past year. McGowan says the service will soon move to other large markets, namely South Florida and Southern California. Eventually, the service will be available in all 18 states where Northern Trust has a presence, Crain’s Chicago Business reports.

Industry experts say Northern Trust appears to be one of the few wealth management firms to create a special unit dedicated to serving the needs of the LGBT community.

Mark Braun, formerly a Northern Trust private banker, is the unit’s new national practice liaison. His duties include building relationships among LGBT individuals and families, community organizations, and other advisors, the company says.

Northern Trust has offered benefits to its employees involved in same-sex relationships for at least 13 years, McGowan notes.

ADP: Employment Is Good. (Also, Other Metrics)

Starting in Europe, the European Union reported its November PPI around 5 AM EST today. October saw a 0.4% increase (for a 4.4% increase year over year), and the consensus expectation was for an additional 0.1% increase (keeping the year over year figures flat). The EU actually came in at a 0.3% increase, bringing the year over year PPI to 4.5%. Not great, but not terribly bad.

Hopping across the Arctic to Our Neighbors to the North, Canada has released its Industrial Product Price Index (IPPI). Which has missed expectations. For November, analysts were expecting to see a 0.3% increase, and they actually had a 0.5% increase. Oddly, however, their year over year IPPI has declined 20 bps to 2.1%, so investors probably won't take this all that badly.

Here in the states, the Mortgage Bankers Association released its Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey figures for the week ending 12/31. The Market Composite Index (which measures margin loan application volume) was up 2.3% for the week, while the Refinance Index (which tracks refinancing volume) was up 3.9% and the Purchase Index (which tracks volume for first-time mortgages) was down 0.8%. Refinancing made up 71.0% or all mortgage activity for the week, and the average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages fell to 4.82%.

The implication is that we're starting to find ourselves in a more favorable interest rate environment and that banks are more willing to refinance, but that that we may be expecting home sales to remain soft. Still, while interesting, this report isn't a huge deal for the markets.

ADP has released its monthly National Employment Report for December, and the word is, well, surprisingly good. November saw 92,000 new nonfarm private sector jobs (revised downwards from the original release of 93,000, but we can live with that[1]) . The Street doesn't make predictions for this one, so I'll just go ahead and tell you that ADP sees nonfarm private-sector employment increasing by 297,000 in December. Here's the breakdown:

• Service sector jobs increased by 270,000[2], the single largest monthly increase in the history of the report. Financial services, a subset of this sector, shed 8000 jobs.
• Goods-producing sector jobs rose 27,000. As a subset of this, manufacturing sector jobs increased 23,000 and construction sector jobs remained unchanged (meaning they didn't drop for the first time since June 2007)
• The greatest gains came from medium businesses, which hired 144,000 new employees. Small businesses hired 117,000, and large businesses hired 36,000.

At 10 AM EST we're looking for the Institute for Supply Management's Non-Manufacturing Index. This tracks the health of all of the various sectors of the US economy that aren't factories - agriculture[3], mining, construction, retail trade, whatever. Just so long as it doesn't come from a factory. Anything over 50% is considered a growing economy. November had a 55%, and we're looking for a 56% for December.

Then at 10:30 EST, we get the Energy Information Administration's weekly figures on petroleum inventories. This has an inverse impact on oil prices in the US - if supplies are increasing, prices tend to fall (and vice-versa). It's not a huge market mover, but commodities traders and people who invest in oil stocks tend to like it.

[1] Unless you're one of the 1000 people revised downwards, anyway.

[2] No word on how many of these are seasonal jobs, though, so this could be a fluke driven by the Holiday shopping season. I'm not saying it is, since I don't know. I'm just saying that January's employment situation report could be a letdown in the face of this explosive growth.

[3] Yeah, yeah, factory farming. Doesn't count.

Factory Orders, Sanjo!

Not all that long ago, I reported that there was no real joy expected from Factory Orders. They were down overall 0.9% for October, and it was expected that they would be absolutely flat for November.

Well, that fairly bleak expectation has been blown out of the water. Overall, factory orders increased by 0.7% in November (with October's factory orders being revised upwards to only a 0.7% decrease). Here's the breakdown:

• New orders for manufactured durable goods were down 0.3%, following October's 3.1% decrease
• Transportation equipment orders were down 11.1%
• Manufactured nondurable goods orders were up 1.7%. This helped buoy up the overall orders, because this represents a total of $228.2 billion in new orders (nearly as much as the other two categories put together).

Shipments as a whole were up 0.8% (following October's 0.4% increase), unfilled orders were up 0.6% (following October's 0.7% increase), and inventories were up 0.8% (following October's 1.1% increase).

Still no word on domestic vehicle sales.

I Genuinely Did Not See That

A friend of mine just pointed out that I had a typo in my URL, of all places. So this is a test post to make sure the correction works.

FW: Well. I Didn't See That Coming.

The Philadelphia Fed's Business Outlook Survey is out now, and it's... well... see for yourself.

We were looking for a 5.6 result for November; good, but only marginally so. Instead we got a 22.5, which administered a savage beating to the expectations. Some of the driving factors are:
* 27% of surveyed firms reported increases in employment, while only 14% reported decreases
* 29% of surveyed firms expect to increase employment over the next 6 months, whole only 7% expect to decrease employment.
* The future prices paid index increased by 7 points, while the future prices received index increased 18 points, indicating a probable increase in revenue..

You can read the release yourself at http://www.philadelphiafed.org/research-and-data/regional-economy/business-outlook-survey/2010/bos1110.cfm.