What I’m watching for this week This week is going to be a really busy one for economic data. I’m not going to be able to do detailed posts on everything. But because in the past couple of months most of the data has gone against my “2019 slowdown” scenario, I thought both in the […]
New home sales suggest housing bottom is in New home sales are extremely volatile, and extremely revised, but they do have the advantage of probably being the single most leading housing statistic, ahead of permits and starts. So it is noteworthy that new home sales for March rose to 692,000, below only one month in […]
Commercial and industrial loans: another sign of a slowdown? There are lots of cross-currents in the economy right now. At the absolute tip of the spear is the decline in interest rates since November, which has led to an improvement in some of the housing market metrics. In the shorter-term outlook, a simple quick-and-dirty metric […]
How increasing local oligopolization has distorted the housing market Earlier this week new home sales for March were reported, soaring to a new expansion high bar one month (November 2017). Something else that a few other writers picked up on: the median *prices* for new homes fell to a level not seen in the past […]
Nailed it! Three weeks ago I wrote No, the Meuller report ***DID NOT*** “find no collusion!” in which I lambasted and parsed Barr’s conclusory snippet of the Mueller report, to wit, that “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” I pointed […]
March real retail sales very strong, but no “all clear” yet This morning’s retail sales report for March was very strong on both a nominal basis, up +1.6%, and also on a real, inflation-adjusted basis, up +1.2%. At the same time, it is still ever so slightly below its peak of five months ago, and […]
YoY Industrial production and structural changes to the US economy since 1980 No big economic releases today, so let me follow up further with a few long-term comments on industrial production. This series goes back 100 years to the beginning of 1919. Since that time it has turned negative YoY 25 times: Of those 25 […]
Industrial production continues to decelerate Industrial production is the King of Coincident Indicators. In dating the onset and end of recessions, in practice the NBER relies upon industrial production more than any other measure. March 2019 production continued a string of recent disappointments, with overall production declining -0.1%, and manufacturing production unchanged. For the first […]
February JOLTS: a mirror of the poor jobs report The JOLTS report on labor is noteworthy and helpful because it breaks down the jobs market into a more granular look at hiring, firing, and voluntary quits. Its drawback is that the data only goes back less than 20 years, so from the point of view […]
Real wages got gassed in March The consumer price index rose +0.4% in March, mainly as a result of a big monthly increase in gas prices. That really shouldn’t have been a surprise, since almost every time gas prices have increased by as much as they did in March — up 9% for the month […]