– by New Deal democrat While much of the official government data is still delayed, months after the end of the shutdown, privately sourced data remains fully up to date. And March data started out with the ISM manufacturing index, which was our second piece of (mainly) good news of the morning. The headline ISM number […]

 – by New Deal democrat After all these months, we are still feeling the effects of the government shutdown last fall.  Normally construction spending is released on the first day of the month for the second previous month – in today’s case, that would be for February. But half a year after the shutdown began, […]

 – by New Deal democrat I normally don’t pay too much attention to the JOLTS report, and I won’t this month, either. It does break down the labor market further than the jobs report, and it does have several slightly leading components, so let’s at least take a brief look. Below are job openings (blue), […]

– by New Deal democrat The two national repeat home sales indexes, from the FHFA and Case-Shiller, were reported this morning and both continued to confirm the gradual abatement in shelter inflation. The Case-Shiller National index (blue in the graphs below) up 0.2% for the three month period ending in January, while the FHFA index […]

 – by New Deal democrat As readers know well, one of my favorite “real life” indicators is real aggregate nonsupervisory payrolls, which measures how much in wages average American workers have to spend each month. When it is growing, economic expansions almost always continue; when it declines by any significant amount, recessions almost always ensue […]

 – by New Deal democrat “Trump take egg” was a social media meme popularized by MTSW at Bluesky, highlighting prices that T—-p had promised would come down, but increased instead. The spike in egg prices was due to avian flu, but when it comes to internet memes, nevermind. Which is by way of introduction to saying that […]

 – by New Deal democrat Along with the weekly update of retail sals, new jobless claims continue to be the most positive economic data in the entire specturm. Last week new cliams increased 5,000 to 210,000, which is about average for the entire post-pandemic period. The only other time they were this low was 2018-19, […]

 – by New Deal democrat There’s no big economic data today, so let me update something I posted last week, in which I warned readers to expect a shock in the next CPI report.  I wrote that “based on past history and using conservative assumptions, the model forecasts a 1.8% increase in CPI between March and […]

 – by New Deal democrat Something not just unusual, but unprecedented has happened in the bond market this year. Normally, when an inverted yield curve (where earlier maturing bonds yield more than later maturing ones) regularizes, or un-inverts (where yields get higher the later the maturing), it is because the Fed has lowered rates sufficiently […]

 – by New Deal democrat This morning the construction spending report for January was released (note that this is still about 3 weeks later than usual, so last autumn’s government shutdown continues to reverberate in the data). In the past I have used it to help track the long leading sector of housing, but in the […]