– by New Deal democrat The story continues to be “same old, same old” with unemployment claims. Initial claims declined -2,000 last week to 227,000. The four week moving average rose 1,000 to 231,500. With the typical one week delay, continuing claims rose 36,000 to 1.903 million: The YoY story continues to be the same as […]

 – by New Deal democrat A few days ago, Prof. Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser posted the below graphs comparing the time that hard vs. soft data reacted to economic shocks: As you know, I have been looking at hard “high frequency” data to see if any of the effects of Tariff-palooza! have shown up yet. And […]

 – by New Deal democrat Until Thursday we are once again in a data drought this week. In the meantime, there are a few points I want to address, including the very important Moody’s downgrade of US debt. But there was one important piece of data that came out last week that I didn’t discuss yet: […]

 – by New Deal democrat In April total permits (dark blue in the graph below) declined -69,000 on an annualized basis to 1.412 million, while the less volatile single family permits (red, right scale) number declined -50,000 to 922,000. The slightly lagging and much more volatile starts number (gray, narrow) rose 22,000 to 1.361 million annualized: […]

– by New Deal democrat The final datapoint for today is industrial production, including its important manufacturing component.  Last month I wrote that “I suspect the big increases in February and March in manufacturing, like this morning’s retail sales numbers, were about front-running T—-p’s tariffs. Which means that like retail sales, production might have been […]

 – by New Deal democrat Next up in today’s slew of data is retail sales. This is one of the most important indicators I look at, because it tells us so much about consumers, and since consumption leads employment, it gives us information about the trend in that as well. In April, nominally retail sales […]

Jobless claims: more of the same  – by New Deal democrat After a long data drought, there are many releases today. I’ll start with jobless claims. Initial claims were unchanged at 229,000, while the four week moving average rose 2,250 to 230,500. With the typical one week delay, continuing claims rose 9,000 to 1.881 million: […]

 – by New Deal democrat Now that we have April’s consumer inflation data, let’s update real wages for average American families. In April average hourly wages for nonsupervisory employees increased 0.3%, and aggregate payrolls for nonsupervisory employees increased 0.4%. Since CPI increased 0.2%, in real terms wages (light blue) increased 0.1% and aggregate payrolls (dark blue) […]

 – by New Deal democrat Last month, I wrote that the March CPI report was the one we had been waiting for for the past three years. April’s was the second one in a row. To cut to the chase, there were no major components besides shelter which qualified as “problem children,” i.e., sectors with 4.0% […]

 – by New Deal democrat We’re still in a new data drought. CPI is out tomorrow, and then a slew of data on Thursday. In the meantime there is one more data point that helps explain why consumers are still powering the economy forward. The Atlanta Fed maintains a “wage tracker” that measures wage growth, […]