Michelle Obama, Macro-Economist

You may know her as a world-class traveler and fabulous expensive sneaker-wearer or as a famous life-long non-proud American, but what I bet you didn't know about Michelle Obama was that she is also a great economist. So, great, in fact, that she can make a bold economic analysis that is at odds with the consensus view that the economy is struggling.  That bold call is that the economy is undergoing a HUGE recovery.

Yes, the huge-ness of the recovery is so subtle that companies such as Cummins Engine can't detect it, but it's out there...promise. 

Orders for Class 8 trucks, the largest models, fell 35 percent in North America last month to 15,205, according to FTR Associates. Cummins yesterday trimmed its profit and sales outlooks and said it expects to eliminate as many as 1,500 jobs by year-end. Accuride said today it will miss its annual projections and has cut its salaried workforce by 14 percent.

Cummins’s revised forecasts were “worse than feared,” said Kristine Kubacki, a St. Louis-based analyst at Avondale Partners LLC with a market perform rating on the shares. “My sense is the Street thought there would be a guide down, but this is sizable.”

Her model is also so sophisticated that it has moved beyond the tired and hackneyed models that typically use Fedex as a bellweather for economic activity, because why would people sending stuff to each other be indicative of anything, right?

FedEx Corp. (FDX), the operator of the world’s biggest cargo airline, lowered its annual profit outlook on Sept. 18 after a weakening economy prompted shippers in the U.S. and overseas to switch to cheaper delivery. The Memphis, Tennessee-based company, viewed as an economic barometer, this week trimmed its forecast for 2012 U.S. economic growth to 2.1 percent from 2.2 percent.

Ignore the biased media trying all it can do to undermine Barack, the recovery is here and it's HUGE!