If you believe Tim Harford, and you should, the elevator is one of the 50 things that made the modern economy.

But the elevator as we have known it since 1852 has had some major practical limitations. Specifically, elevators can generally only go up or down, and despite such theoretical concepts as the Wonkavator, elevators that can be found to do more than just move up and down a single shaft are few and far in between.

One of those few and far in between places is ThyssenKrupp's prototype elevator test facility in Rottheim, Germany, where the company's MULTI elevators can go up, down, and sideways. (HT: Core77).

If it proves feasible, this is the kind of development that could significantly reshape the architecture of major cities, much as the invention of the safety elevator itself enabled the practical construction of skyscrapers that helped create the modern city skyline.

"Where a full cabin is stopping at every floor and people are smiling at each other outside and inside the elevator and nobody is getting out or in, this will change," said Andreas Schierenbeck, CEO of ThyssenKrupp Elevator.

"Instead you fill a cabin with six to eight people and they're going to the exact location where you want without any stops—it's like a metro system where you stop at the station where you want."...

"With the horizontal movement of the MULTI, you can connect buildings. You can connect train stations with your buildings, you could even have your own cabin waiting for you at your hotel room—all these things which have been a little bit science fiction maybe three, four, five years ago are now possible,” added Schierenbeck.

The potential applications go beyond buildings. Laid out horizontally, the same technologies that ThyssenKrupp is pioneering in its elevator application could reshape modern manufacturing by better facilitating the flow of production from one work station to another, or to even reconfigure the layout of modular work stations themselves on the fly as needed to meet changing production requirements.

August 2017 was something of a mixed month for dividend-paying stocks in the U.S. stock market. On the plus side, the number of U.S. firms announcing dividend increases was up and the number of firms announcing dividend cuts were down, both month over month and year over year, both of which are positive indications of the health of the private sector of the U.S. economy.

Zooming in a little closer on the dividend cut portion of the bigger picture....

What makes the picture for the dividend-paying sector of the U.S. economy a mixed one is the sharp increase in the number of firms that omitted making dividend payments in August 2017, where the number of firms that did so spiked up to levels typically seen during periods of economic distress within the U.S. economy.

Together, the number of first that either omitted paying dividends or that announced dividend cuts suggests that the U.S. economy is above the threshold where some degree of economic contraction is taking place. Based on our real time sources for dividend declarations, that distress would appear to be primarily concentrated in the oil and gas sector, with the financial sector of the U.S. economy currently also being negatively impacted.

With that analsysis in mind, here are the dividend numbers for the month of August 2017:

• 3,454 U.S. firms issued some kind of declaration regarding their dividends in August 2017, which is up from the 3,037 that did so in July 2017. Compared to a year ago however, the number of companies that declared their dividends was down from the 3,669 that were recorded in August 2016.
• Just as in July 2017, 25 U.S. companies announced that they would pay a special or extra dividend payment in August 2017, which is down from 29 announcements of special dividend payments made in August 2016.
• The number of dividend increases declined to 132 in August 2017 from the 161 that were announced in July 2017. The number of dividend increases was significantly up from the 110 that were announced in August 2016.
• 16 U.S. firms announced that they were cutting their dividends in August 2017, falling from both the 23 that cut dividends in July 2017 and the 21 that cut their dividends in August 2016.
• More significantly, 15 companies omitted paying their scheduled dividends in August 2017, up from 6 in July 2017 and also up year over year from the 7 that omitted paying dividends in August 2016.

Like dividend cut announcements, omitted dividends indicate that firms are experiencing financial distress, but unlike dividend cuts, announcements of omitted dividends are often missed in the automated screens that capture news of changes in corporate dividend policies, so we do not have great visibility into which firms have chosen to take this action.

Data Sources

Standard and Poor. S&P Market Attributes Web File. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 1 September 2017.

Seeking Alpha Market Currents. Filtered for Dividends. [Online Database]. Accessed 1 September 2017.

Wall Street Journal. Dividend Declarations. [Online Database]. Accessed 1 September 2017.

The biggest news story in Week 5 of August 2017 was the ongoing aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas, which in addition to being almost at the center of damage produced by the natural disaster, is the fourth largest city in the United States and also the defacto capital of the nation's energy industry.

Surprisingly, the S&P 500 performed slightly better than our dividend futures-based forecasting model anticipated during the week, assuming that investors remain largely focused on the distant future quarter of 2018-Q2 in setting today's stock prices.

In response to the Hurricane Harvey, the CME Group's FedWatch tool is now indicating that there will be no change in short term U.S. interest rates from their current 1.00-1.25% target range through the first quarter of 2018. Investors are currently betting that the Fed will next change its Federal Funds Rate in 2018-Q2, at the 13 June 2018 meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, when it is expected to boost it, most likely to the 1.25-1.50% range.

As to why the S&P 500 behaved as well as it did in the fifth week of August 2017, a beginning explanation may be found in the Gulf coast city of Corpus Christi, which has become a major export center for U.S.-produced oil and gas, which was also near the epicenter for where Hurricane Harvey made its landfall. The city's port facilities appear to have weathered the storm well despite some notable damage to vessels in the port, where the port itself and nearby refineries successfully reopened several days earlier than expected on Thursday, 31 August 2017.

Meanwhile, here were the other headlines of note that we flagged during the final week of August 2017.

Monday, 28 August 2017

• U.S. gasoline price jumps, crude falls as Harvey hits refiners
• Wall Street closes little changed as Harvey pummels Texas

Tuesday, 29 August 2017

• U.S. stock futures fall after North Korea missile report
• Harvey's rains shut in more U.S. refineries, sending fuel prices higher
• Harvey throws a wrench into U.S. energy engine
• Gasoline jumps 4 percent, oil mixed as storm hits more refineries
• Wall Street ends higher as fear over North Korea dissipates

Wednesday, 30 August 2017

• Gasoline jumps, crude down; Harvey shuts 24 percent of U.S. refining
• Upbeat U.S. growth revision drives Wall Street higher

Thursday, 31 August 2017

• Oil rises, gasoline jumps 10 percent as U.S. refineries reel
• Wall Street gains on data and Mnuchin tax reform remarks

Friday, 1 September 2017

• U.S. gasoline in first slide since Harvey, oil under pressure
• Harvey's wake tempers bullish outlook for U.S. oil output growth
• Wall Street edges up as rate-hike bets in check after jobs data

Elsewhere, Barry Ritholtz captured the positives and negatives for the U.S. economy and markets in Week 5 of August 2017.

On a final note, if you look at our alternative futures chart above, you'll see that we're coming up on another one of those periods where the echoes of past volatility in stock prices will affect the accuracy of our standard forecasting model for the S&P 500, which will hit during the latter part of the upcoming week. At this time, we anticipate that the S&P 500 will largely continue to move mostly sideways, where the level of the S&P 500 will end the week somewhere around 50 points higher than where our unadjusted model indicates. We'll look at adjusting our forecast chart to account for the echo effect in next week's edition!