Generate’s Investment Specialist Greg Smith was on Newstalk ZB with Mike Hosking this morning, discussing how the US consumer looks to be in strong shape based on Black Friday sales. He also covered what’s driving the huge run in silver prices this year. Back home, he looks at the positive takeaways from the latest data on filled jobs.
Listen here or read the transcript below:
From Generate this Monday morning, Greg Smith, good morning to you.
Morning to you Mike.
Retail, what did we get?
Going pretty well in the US, so spending up 4.1% on Black Friday according to MasterCard. So it's up on last year which was a 3.4% rise. So in store sales 1.7%. But the real action Mike, online sales up 10.4% on last year. Also Adobe Analytics, they monitored traffic on retail websites. They reported a record 6.4 billion online on Thanksgiving Day alone. That's up over 5%. It is taking some discounting to get US shoppers excited. So electronics, they were cut by around 28% towards by 27%.
But they were buying. Black Friday itself, Americans had already spent $8.6 billion online. Adobe reckons that that final number will land between 11.7 and 11.9, that would be a record. Online sales over the rest of the weekend and they were expected to stay strong. So 5.5 billion for Saturday, 5.9 billion on Sunday.
And drum roll, of course, today, Mike, everyone will be out there on a Cyber Monday and that's expected to be the biggest online shopping day of the year. Again, projected to hit 14.2 billion. That would be up 6% on last year. So it provides a bit of comfort after some of those confidence surveys recently. And for us here in New Zealand, of course, retailers are going to be watching this very closely. Let's see if Kiwi shoppers are as equally upbeat.
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Now this silver thing just lost in translation, really, because we've all been obsessed with gold.
Yeah, that's right. Gold sort of had its gold run this year. It's up around about 60%, but silver up around 90% and you've had prices surging on Friday actually so over 55 U.S. dollars an ounce, up 6% in fact to 56.50. That's an all-time high also came as the world's largest precious metal exchange,COMEX. They actually had a big outage. So when that came back online, so did a rush of pent-up buying. But Mike yeah, it's not just a technical blip.
Silver's been doing well all year, thanks to mix of strong investment demand, tightening global supply, stockpiles in London and Shanghai, they've been running low. You've had mine production falling under investment, especially in Latin America. And the on demand side, as we know, your structural trends are really providing a boom for silver.
So EVs, AI- related electronics, solar panels. They're all booming, of course. And if we all end up having EVs, time will tell. The average electric car is going to need a kilo of silver, compared with today's gas guzzlers, which just need a few grams. And you talked about India just before. That's also been a big part of the story. World's number one silver buyer, demand jumped into the monsoon harvest and hitting into Diwali. And that's keep going. So, yeah, the frenzy's been building for a long time. Tight supply, booming industrial use. So silver's shine, that might not fade anytime soon.
Good stuff. What about jobs?
Jobs, we've been talking about green shoots, but they’re yet to transpire in the jobs market. So we're still looking for something.
So filled jobs in New Zealand were 2.34 million in October, that was down half percent on October 2024. But at least we've stopped deteriorating by the looks. So if you take a glass-half-full approach, perhaps surprisingly, public sector Mike up 2% on the year. That's the strongest lifts since mid 24. Healthcare doing well, tourism-linked industries doing well, construction still not so good. So probably the last to turn around I suppose, but that's down more than 4% in terms of filled jobs.
Auckland looks to be stabilising, Wellington still down the dumps, Canterbury adding jobs. So they're familiar trends and of course, young workers still doing it tough aged 15 to 19, that was the biggest annual decline. People in their 30s and early 40s are seeing some job growth. Gross earnings still rising up around about 1.1%. Of course, that's below CPI, so that's something else. But what does this all mean? The MEI that this is normally a good predictor of official unemployment figures that basically shows that growth and employment isn't yet keeping up with population. So we might actually see unemployment tick up to around 5.4% in the December quarter.
Hiring surveys, we did talk about the SEEK job ads, it's last week. So they're looking a bit more positive. You demand overall still pretty soft. Hopefully, Mike, this improves running into 2026 with of all those interest rate cuts filtering through.
Nice, give me the numbers.
So the Dow was up .6% of 47716. S&P up half percent 6849. NASDAQ up .7 percent 23365. Footsie up .3%. Nikkei up .2 percent. ASX200 was flat 8614. We were higher, NZ 50 up .4 percent 13489. Gold, that was running as well. Up 82 dollars, 4239. Oil down 10 cents, 58.55.
Pretty mixed in the currency markets, against the US 57.4 for the Kiwi. Against Australian dollar 87.5, sort of ticked up a bit there. 43.3 in sterling, Japanese yen 89.6.
This week might we've got more data coming out. Thankfully. We've got US manufacturing services, got some inflation. We've also got another consumer sentiment survey in the US that'll be interesting. EU inflation, Aussie third quarter GDP, some earnings trickling through. We got Salesforce, a bunch of Canadian banks, Hewlett Packard. Locally building permits, trade data and this dairy option that's going to be really closely watched.
Yeah, it's going to be good. All right, mate. We'll see you. See you next week. Appreciate it. Greg Smith at Generate Wealth and Kiwi Saver specialists.