Dating back to 1980, there have been five Friday the 13^ths in March, and they have all been pretty negative for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 Index…this year being no exception. Another sizable decline in the price of oil (today by -4.3%) was sparked by analysts at Goldman Sachs stating that they do not believe oil prices have reached a bottom yet in 2015. The firm expects that US oil inventories will continue to build at a rapid pace and should reach a “new normal” in the second half of the year, albeit still at record low prices. The International Energy Agency (IEA) also said that the US may soon run out of space to store spare crude oil while total rig counts in North America continue to decline.

While the readings for the producer price index (PPI) remain low, the University of Michigan published additional disappointing economic data. There appears to be a bubble in consumer spirits that produced a surge that came and went without actually materializing into greater spending. The preliminary reading for the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index fell very sharply to a reading of 91.2, down by 4.2 points in the final reading in February and is now the lowest reading since November 2014. Overall consumer sentiment peaked at a reading of 98.2 in the preliminary reading for January which was the highest reading in 8 years. The two components, current conditions and expectations, both posted massive declines over the final reading in February. The current conditions reading declined by 3.9 points to 103.0 and the expectations component declined by 4.3 points to 83.7. Ultimately, the decline in current conditions points to weakness in consumer spending for March while the decline in expectations points to a falloff in confidence for the jobs outlook in the month. Gasoline prices have been edging higher in recent weeks which ended up lifting inflation expectations as well.  Ultimately, the strength in the jobs market is the most important component of the consumer outlook and has been relatively positive, but clearly this optimism has yet to materialize in the form of higher consumer spending.