The spending transition from goods to services – by New Deal democrat Today is the last day for a very light economic week of news. One item worth addressing is the relative state of consumer purchases of goods vs. services in this pandemic recovery, because it appears to be unique. Let’s start with the ISM […]
Another week of good news on jobless claims – by New Deal democrat Initial jobless claims had been in an almost relentless uptrend from the end of March through early August. Since then, they have completely reversed. This week initial claims declined another -6,000 to 222,000, and the 4 week average declined -7,500 to 233,000. […]
“Coronavirus dashboard for September 7: the slow ebbing on the way to endemicity continues” I promised a COVID update, so I suppose I ought to follow through. Let’s start today with a graph of South Africa’s cases and deaths for the past year: South Africa is where BA.1 and BA.4&5 originated. You can see the […]
I told you so Not much economic news this week. I’ll post an update on COVID later, but for now, a follow-up on my Mar A Lago search warrant post last week. Last week I concluded my observations as follows: “Despite how devastating the DoJ response apparently is, it is important to remember that this […]
On Labor Day 2022, how well is labor doing? This is Labor Day, so let’s take a look at a few metrics of how labor is doing. As an initial aside, occasionally I get asked why I write about expansions and recessions. An important reason is, pretty much by definition during recessions jobs and income […]
Weekly Indicators for August 29 – September 2 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The consumer portion of the economy continues to benefit from lower gas prices, while the producer side continues to suffer from higher interest rates. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the […]
August jobs report: despite a good headline number, the decelerating trend resumes I have written a number of times since February that the short leading indicators have signaled that we should expect weaker monthly employment reports, with both fewer new jobs and a higher unemployment rate. That was completely *not* the case in July, In […]
A respite in manufacturing in August, continued decline in construction in July As usual, the new month’s first data is for manufacturing and construction. Here’s a look at each. The ISM manufacturing index, and especially its new orders subindex, is an important short leading indicator for the production sector. In August, after two months of […]
In which I parse and war-game the Trump “special master” litigation And now, for something completely different .. .. While I have zero special knowledge about Federal criminal procedure, I *do* pay very close attention to “tells” in human behavior. (See, for example, my parsing of Bill Barr’s ‘summary’ of Mueller’s report summary, in which […]
June house price indexes show no peak yet; no respite likely in the “official” consumer housing measure Yesterday the Case Shiller and FHFA house price indexes were updated through June (technically, the average of April through June. Because the Case Shiller index is not seasonally adjusted, the best way to show them is YoY. Here […]