A closer look at the housing rebound On Wednesday we got some excellent new residential construction numbers. I went into a lot more detail, showing how – exactly as I forecast – the turn in interest rates led the turn in housing sales by about six months, over at Seeking Alpha. As usual, clicking over and […]
Initial claims increasingly foreclose 2019-early 2020 downturn I’ve been monitoring initial jobless claims closely for the past several months, to see if there are any signs of stress. This is because the long leading indicators were negative one year ago, and many – but not a majority – of the short leading indicators have recently […]
Housing: BOOM! Well, this is an easy post. This morning’s report (Wed.) on housing permits and starts showed new expansion highs in both overall permits and starts. The less volatile single family segment also recovered, with both single family permits and starts at one year highs, although slightly below their expansion peaks. Here are total […]
Industrial production rebounds; another message of slowdown, no recession Industrial Production is the King of Coincident Indicators. When industrial production peaks and troughs coincides more often than any other indicator to NBER’s recession dating. Let’s take a look at the report for August, which was pretty darn good, which was released this morning. Production as a […]
August retail sales confirm healthy consumer sector Retail sales are one of my favorite indicators, because in real terms they can tell us so much about the present, near term forecast, and longer term forecast for the economy. This morning retail sales for August were reported up +0.4%, and July, which was already very good […]
Real average and aggregate wage growth for August Now that we have the August inflation reading, let’s take a look at real wage growth. First of all, nominal average hourly wages in June increased a strong +0.5%, while consumer prices increased +0.1%, meaning real average hourly wages for non-managerial personnel increased +0.4%. This translates into […]
July JOLTS report: m/m improvement, but slowing trend Yesterday*s morning’s JOLTS report for July was in general surprisingly positive on a monthly basis, but continued to show a slowing trend. To review, because this series is only 20 years old, we only have one full business cycle to compare. During the 2000s expansion: Hires peaked first, […]
Scenes from the August jobs report The August jobs report was the mirror image of most earlier reports this year: a lackluster Establishment report but a strong Household report. Let’s take a look. By now the fact that there has been a jobs slowdown is pretty well established. In the last 7 months, only 964,000 […]
August jobs report: for once, the underwhelming headline masked very good internals HEADLINES: +130,000 jobs added (+105,000 ex-Census) U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 3.7% U6 underemployment rate rose 0.2% to 7.2% Leading employment indicators of a slowdown or recession I am highlighting these because many leading indicators overall strongly suggest that an employment slowdown […]
Two sharply contrasting reports on the economy to start September We got two contrasting views of the economy this morning. (Tuesday) First, the good news: residential construction spending increased in July. Below I show it in comparison with single family permits: Typically construction follows permits. In the past few years, it has been almost coincident […]