– by New Deal democrat No significant new economic news today, so let me follow up on Wednesday’s post about production and sales. The high frequency indicator I follow on the manufacturing side is the new orders components of the manufacturing indexes published each month by five of the regional Feds. As I wrote Wednesday, these […]

 – by New Deal democrat Let’s take our weekly look at initial claims, the first indicator that should show stress in any rising unemployment scenario. Last week initial jobless claims rose 2,000 to 223,000, and the four week average rose 750 to 227,000. With the typical one week delay, continuing claims rose 33,000 to 1.892 million: […]

Policy uncertainty, business investment, and consumer spending  – by New Deal democrat There’s no significant new economic news today, so let’s take a look at something of a topic du jour. In case you haven’t seen it elsewhere, “economic policy uncertainty” has spiked to a level never seen before aside from the moment the pandemic […]

Two cheers for a great February industrial production report! With a gigantic *  – by New Deal democrat Two cheers for the very good industrial production report for Feburary! Total production increased 0.7%, and manufacturing production increased 0.9% to the highest level in over two years: But the biggest news is that the headline number wasn’t […]

February housing construction rangebound, but at recessionary or near-recessionary levels  – by New Deal democrat As usual, the month’s important housing data starts out with construction.  For a quick refresher, I follow this because housing typically leads the rest of the economy by a year or more. After the very leading, but very noisy and […]

– by New Deal democrat Let me start out this month with a historical review of why I have always paid so much attention to real retail sales. Going back almost 80 years, real retail sales have always turned down in advance of a recession, and they have almost always turned negative YoY simultaneously or […]

 – by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. Despite the steep sell-off and rebound in the stock market this week, the underlying “hard data” indicators about money, spending, and transportation were all steady and almost all positive. The sell-off was about sentiment due to the uncertainty brought about by the […]

The constant threats of tariff this and tariff that has its consequences and creates an instability to which the market reacts. Threatening our next-door neighbors with variable tariff rates does not bode well for Wall Street. Forty percent to seven percent, hmmmm . . . No recession yet. NDd has his report below. The Quick […]

 – by New Deal democrat I typically do not pay much attention to producer prices. Sometimes they do lead consumer prices, but since the turn of the Millennium more often they have been coincident. But with the onset of tariff wars, they may set off some of the first alarm bells. And that may have been […]

February CPI: a very good report, with even the chronic “problem children” getting “less bad”  – by New Deal democrat Let me cut right to the chase: the February consumer inflation report was actually very good. It wasn’t just that the headline and core numbers only went up 0.2% for the month, or that the […]