Disappointing weekly increase in new jobless claims, but monthly trend improves; expect a 200,000+ number of new jobs in next Employment Report – by New Deal democrat New jobless claims are likely to the most important weekly economic data for the next 3 to 6 months. They are going to tell us whether my suspicion is […]
Coronavirus dashboard for March 19: yes, vaccinations are working The three big Western standouts for vaccination progress have been Israel, the UK, and the US, respectively. And in all three, there have been dramatic declines in both cases and deaths. Let’s look at them in order. First, Israel: 56% of all Israelis have had at […]
Big (weather related) declines in February production and sales This morning (Tuesday) we got the most important single metrics for both the consumer and producer side of the economy for February, respectively, retail sales and industrial production. Both were big misses, one explicitly and the other likely due to the big freeze in Texas and […]
Coronavirus dashboard for March 15: good news, and cause for concern A year ago today I wrote about the accuracy of Jim Bianco’s forecast of exponential spread of COVID-19. At that time there were exactly 2952 cases, but increasing at 30% each day, and I wrote, “I have not seen any government action significant enough to stop this […]
New jobless claims continue to decline, just above the pandemic low New jobless claims are likely to the most important weekly economic data for the next 3 to 6 months. They are going to tell us whether my suspicion that, as a critical mass of those vaccinated is reached, there will be a veritable surge […]
February consumer inflation begins to heat up a little Seasonally adjusted consumer prices rose 0.4% in February. As a result, over the past several months there has been a significant uptick in YoY inflation to 1.7% from 1.1% in November. Aside from the pandemic, for the past 40 years, recessions had happened when CPI less […]
January JOLTS report: during the wintertime pandemic surge, hiring hit a brick wall Yesterday morning’s JOLTS report for January was confirmatory of the weak jobs report for that month, showing a largely paused recovery. Further, for the second month in a row, hires were down sharply. Let’s examine this in accord with the data from […]
Pandemic job losses: when should we begin a see a real improvement back towards “full employment”? Let’s take a deeper look at where employment stands as we begin to see the end of the pandemic in sight. As I and many others noted last Friday, although with the exception of one month there have been […]
Coronavirus dashboard for March 8: Update on the effect of vaccinations My first post on the coronavirus was almost exactly one year ago, on March 10, 2020, “This is what exponential growth looks like,” warning that exponential spread was exactly what had started to happen in the US. We are now finally averaging the administration of […]
Initial jobless claims make further progress towards November lows Last week I “pre-debunked” the idea that a lack of reporting in Texas skewed the big decline in claims, concluding that “being very generous, the ‘real’ seasonally adjusted number of initial claims at worst probably would have been only about 30,000 higher – I.e., 760,000 – […]