– by New Deal democrat Covd-19 has now been with us for over five years. The first reliable statistics started to be kept at the end of March 2020. On Friday the CDC issued the final update for deaths ending the week of March 29, 2025, which means we now have five full years of documentation. […]

 – by New Deal democrat Existing home sales are not that important for forecasting purposes, since they have much less economic impact than new home sales, because the main effect is simply a change in ownership. But there has been an ongoing shortage of housing for over a decade, which was only exacerbated by the […]

 – by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. Another important indicator – corporate profits – tipped into negative territory this week, as Q1 profits look to be substantially below those of Q4 of last year. On the other hand, real money supply from the Fed has tipped back into positive […]

 – by New Deal democrat Jobless claims remained well behaved last week, as they increased 6,000 to 222,000. The four week moving average declined -750 to 220,250. With the typical one-week delay, continuing claims declined -37,000 to 1.841 million, at the low end of its range over the past 10 months: As usual, the YoY% […]

 – by New Deal democrat This morning we got more hard data on manufacturing, one from March, one for this month. In March new durable goods orders (blue in the graph below) soared higher by 9.2% to an all-time high. This was all about front-running tariffs, because excepting motor vehicles they were unchanged (not shown). […]

 – by New Deal democrat In ordinary times, new home sales are important because while they are very noisy and heavily revised, they are the most leading of all housing metrics. They remain important even presently because they can tell us about the underlying upward or downward pressure on the economy going forward one year […]

Regional Feds so far on general business conditions in April: the worst since July 2022  – by New Deal democrat Three of the five regional Feds that report on their region’s state of the economy have now reported for April. With one exception in the data, everything is negative. On the manufacturing side, the NY Fed […]

 – by New Deal democrat Typically this is a week where I pay the most attention to incoming housing data in the form of both new and existing home sales, but because we live in “interesting times,” this week it’s different. The Sword of Damocles hanging over the entire economy is policy uncertainty, for unfortunately […]

 – by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. It remains notable how quickly many of the short leading indicators have turned up. But there has been no discernible hit to consumption. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment as to the state of the […]

“A large, slow-moving gun fired at the economy and the bullet is still in the air”  – by New Deal democrat A poster named Micah on Bluesky has written “the China tariffs were a large, slow-moving gun fired at the economy and the bullet is still in the air” By this, he is referring to the […]