The Daily Feather — Monday, Monday

Monday is derived from Old English Mōnandæg and Middle English Monenday, themselves derivations of Latin’s dies lunae, “day of the moon.” Google songs with “Monday” in the title and you get hits like “Monday, Monday” by The Mama’s and The Papa’s, “Rainy Days and Mondays” by The Carpenters, “New Moon on Monday” by Duran Duran and “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats.

With “credit crunch” trending, banks failing like so many dominoes, and bankruptcies piling up, Monday’s upcoming Federal Reserve Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey (SLOOS) is market participants’ most anticipated economic event. Should we be surprised if lending standards tightened in the second quarter? Absolutely not, though such a conclusion seems a bit off given it clearly had no influence on Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s disposition. While we wait, QI has joined in the virtual space race in economics to comb economic reports for anything that approximates credit conditions. Since yesterday’s docket featured soft-data service sector surveys, we felt compelled to examine what might or might not be ailing the largest part of the U.S. economy.