– by New Deal democrat Our last bit of news before Christmas continued the positive news, as initial jobless claims declined back to 214,000, while the four week average also declined to 216,750. The last three weeks collectively have had the lowest seasonally adjusted numbers since January. Meanwhile, continuing claims rose back above 1.9 million to […]

Strong Q3 GDP, but long leading components are mixed; first preliminary positive signs for production in October  – by New Deal democrat Because today is a travel day for me, I am going to keep my comments about the much-delayed Q3 GDP report brief. As was obvious, a 4.3% annualized real GDP print is very good, […]

  – by New Deal democrat This is going to be a sparse week for data, with the exception of tomorrow’s long-delayed Q3 GDP report, and jobless claims on Wednesday. Sadly, so much of the data is still missing or stale that the best source for up-to-date information is in the regional Fed reports, most […]

 – by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. Update: All of the trends that we have been seeing for the past several months appear to be becoming more entrenched. That includes the re-normalization of the yield curve on the positive side, and weak withholding tax payments and transportation metrics on […]

– by New Deal democrat The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) is “the gold standard of US employment measures. It is an actual census of 95%+ of all employers, who must report new employees for purposes like unemployment and disability benefits. Because of this, it is used for the final revisions, a/k/a benchmarks, for monthly […]

 – by New Deal democrat A truncated version of the CPI was reported for November this morning. Since no data was collected for October, the monthly change in those values was not calculated, the Census Bureau apparently having elected not to publish with the cumulative two month changes since September. Nevertheless, the two month numbers are […]

 – by New Deal democrat [Note: An update to my OS the other day has nuked my ability to post graphs. For now, I will post links to FRED graphs that you can access. For this post, I am only using one such link. If I am unable to resolve the problem, drastic action may be […]

– by New Deal democrat [Note: An update to my OS the other day has nuked my ability to post graphs. For now, I will post links to FRED graphs that you can access. If I am unable to resolve the problem, drastic action may be required.] Angry Bear can post the images while NDd […]

 – by New Deal democrat At Last this morning we got some up to date labor data from the federal government, but only partially. The Establishment Survey was updated for both October and November, while the Household Survey was not conducted at all for October, and so jumps from September to November. In November virtually all […]

 – by New Deal democrat To be updated by NDd. Today is the last day of our data drought before the onslaught of delayed reports that begins tomorrow with the November jobs report and CPI.  In the meantime, there is a commenter on another economics site who generally believes that everything is OK as along as […]