“Every time inflation went up more than aggregate payrolls YoY, it marked the beginning of a recession +/- 2 months.“ More fuel to help consumers deal with tariffs: real aggregate nonsupervisory payrolls likely increased again in April  – by New Deal democrat One of my favorite indicators is both a significant update from last week’s jobs […]

 – by New Deal democrat Initial jobless claims returned to a well-behaved range this week, down -13,000 to 228,000. The four week moving average was in line, increasing 1,000 to 227,000. Continuing claims, with the typical one week delay, declined -37,000 to 1.879 million, which is still near the top end of their 12 month range: […]

 – by New Deal democrat Let’s take a belated look at some of the more important datapoints that came out of last Friday’s employment report for April. To start with, as I’ve mentioned numerous times, frequently service jobs (blue in the graph below) continue increasing all the way through recessions. It is goods producing jobs (red) […]

 – by New Deal democrat Back in March I took a look at how producers and consumers reacted to periods of high political policy uncertainty, concluding that usually in the past consumers had reacted first, somewhere between almost simultaneously to with a one quarter delay, and producers reacted afterward to the downturn in demand by cutting back […]

– by New Deal democrat Because manufacturing is much less important to the economy than in the decades before the Millennium, the economically weighted average of the ISM services index (75%) as well as manufacturing (25%), especially over a three month period, has been much more accurate since 2000. In April the important aspects of the […]

 –by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. Aside from the declines in the April regional Fed reports of general business conditions, there has been no significant fallout in the high frequency data from the tariff trade wars – at least, not yet. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring […]

 – by New Deal democrat I’ll keep today’s report on construction spending brief. The important part of this metric is residential construction spending, another proxy for housing. On a nominal basis, in March residential construction spending (red) declined -0.4%, while total construction spending (blue) declined -0.5%: These are hardly terrible declines. BUT, the price of […]

 – by New Deal democrat My question over the past year had been whether “decleration” into a “soft landing”would turn into “deterioration” towards a recession. That has now been overtaken by events in the form of T—-p‘s tariffs and trade wars. So my focus now is looking for hard data, rather than reports of sentiment, […]

  – by New Deal democrat [Note: I’ll report separately on construction spending, also released this morning] Although manufacturing is of diminishing importance to the economy, (it was in deep contraction both in 2015-16 and again in 2022 without any recession), the ISM manufacturing index remains an important indicator with a 75+ year history of accurately describing […]

 – by New Deal democrat I suspect we will look back on this morning’s report on jobless claims as the first concrete sign of impending recession. Initial claims rose 18,000 to 241,000, the highest since February 22. The four week moving average rose 5,500 to 226,000. With the usual one week lag, continuing claims rose 83,000 […]