Go through the late 2015/early 2016 articles published on this and similar sites and you’ll find a consensus that 2016 was going to be a really bad year. Corporate profits were falling, business inventories had spiked, and deflation was deepening in Japan and Europe. See More Ominous Charts For 2016 for a longer list of indicators that seemed, a year ago, to portend imminent recession if not full-blown financial crisis.

As David Stockman put it in a late-2015 prediction piece,

The Keynesian Recovery Meme Is About To Get Mugged, Part 1

Just consider the most recent data on wholesale sales and inventory. This sector of the domestic economy embodies the leading edge of business activity, meaning that trends in wholesale level sales and inventory stocking are advance indicators of the general macroeconomic outlook.

Needless to say, the soaring inventory-sales ratio is not a sign that “escape velocity” is just around the corner. Contrariwise, whenever the ratio has busted through 1.30X in the past, what came next was a recession.