– by New Deal democrat New economic data will resume tomorrow. Since I haven’t updated the impact of Tariff-palooza! on transport and spending in awhile, let’s take a look at that. The “tip of the spear” is container shipping. Here’s a graph of traffic at the busiest ports in the US, from CNBC: At the busiest […]
– by New Deal democrat Once again there is a hiatus in the data for a couple of days. So let’s take a look at two of my favorite labor indicators: real average hourly wages and real aggregate payrolls for nonsupervisory workers. First, here are real average hourly earnings for nonsupervisory workers: These were unchanged in […]
– by New Deal democrat As we get towards the end of the month, the data from the important leading housing sector begins to be reported. This morning’s report on housing permits, starts, and construction continues the trend that has been in place for several years. For the month, permits (gold in the graph below) […]
– by New Deal democrat Consumption leads employment, and retail sales are the most timely monthly indicator of consumption. Indeed, population-adjusted real retail sales in the past have tended to turn negative one year or more before a recession has begun. In June, nominally retail sales rose a strong 0.6%. But because consumer prices rose 0.3%, […]
– by New Deal democrat Probably the brightest spot in the entire economy right now is initial jobless claims. Contrary to the general theme of deceleration which has been the case for several years now, initial claims appear to be breaking trend in the positive direction. Specifically, initial claims declined -7,000 last week to 221,000, their […]
– by New Deal democrat Industrial production is much less central to the US economic picture than it was before the “China shock,” since so much production moved overseas, meaning US consumers buy much more imported goods than they used to. Still it is an important if diminished coincident indicator. This morning’s report for June was […]
– by New Deal democrat Much of the commentary on yesterday’s CPI report suggested that the tariff impacts were apparent. My own analysis was more cautious. That’s simply because we don’t know for sure which items were affected by tariffs, and at this point referring to, e.g., appliances that showed relatively large monthly increases in prices […]
– by New Deal democrat We are at somewhat of an inflection point as to consumer inflation. On the one hand, the post-pandemic inflationary effects continue to fade. But on the other, we are waiting for the effects of Tariff-palooza! In June the waning post-pandemic effects continued to dominate, as the only items still rising […]
– by New Deal democrat The post-jobs report data drought finally ends tomorrow. Today, let me take the opportunity to update some important trends that have been affected or caused by the T—-p Administration’s “policies.” All graphs below showing absolute values have been normed to a value of 100 as of Election Day last November. […]
– by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. Despite the warning signs in some of the recent monthly data that I’ve highlighted in the past several weeks, the high frequency data this past week indicated smooth sailing, at least for now. Some of that is likely due to the 4th of […]