Intel alone could not overcome all the negatives on the day. Retail sales were down more than expected, off 0.5%. However, if you strip out autos and gas, June sales beat expectations with a gain of just 0.1%. Import prices were hurt by commodity prices, mostly. Business inventories gained only 0.1% in May. What we’ve seen in the regional Fed data is that the inventory rebuild cycle, which adds to GDP, started in Q1. However, companies put on the breaks, fearing an impending economic slowdown. They neither added to inventory nor hired new workers. That may have kept their costs down, but it will negatively impact GDP. Then the FOMC minutes came out. As anticipated, the Fed admitted to growth slowing, which provoked several major firms to cut GDP expectations for Q2 to the low 2% range from right around 3%. This is part of what prevented the market from gaining any ground on good earnings numbers. There was one other component of the FOMC minutes, and that was that the Fed officials spent time talking about “what if” the economy was to slow dramatically. This is what you get when you have a transparent Fed. Simply talking about a worst case scenario implies the Fed is worried about it. Just as the market was worried about a double dip several weeks ago, the Fed was talking about the same issues. They might be thinking differently now, but we won’t know that for another month and a half. We’ve got a lot of economic data and earnings out today. It should be a hard-fought battle.