but some 3+ year highs in unemployment metrics  – by New Deal democrat My question over the past year has been whether “decleration” would turn into “deterioration.” For a “soft landing,” deceleration would need to end, and the numbers stabilize, vs. continuing to deteriorate towards an actual downturn.  The verdict this month was mixed. On the […]

Jobless claims decline back into neutral territory  – by New Deal democrat After last week’s big jump, this week initial jobless claims declined -21,000 to 221,000. The four-week moving average increased 250 to 224,250. With the typical one-week delay, continuing claims rose 42,000 to 1.897 million: On the more important YoY basis for forecasting purposes, […]

Economically weighted ISM indexes for February indicate continued slow growth  – by New Deal democrat Because manufacturing is now of much less importance to the economy than in the decades before the Millennium, I now use a weighted average of the ISM services index (75%) as well as manufacturing (25%) as the primary forecasting tool. […]

– by New Deal democrat There’s no important economic data today, so this is a good time to write about several important developments in the stock and bond markets. First of all, as many of you may already know, a portion of the US Treasury yield curve, between the 10 year and 3 month Treasuries, re-inverted […]

– by New Deal democrat 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 that sector and forecasting it over the short term.  Any […]

– by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. Last week I wrote that exogenous factors – like political decisions – could have nearly simultaneous effects across all timeframes of indicators. In other words, the long and short leading indicators as well as the coincident indicators, could all react at the […]

 – by New Deal democrat There were two important points in this morning’s personal income and spending report for January. The first is that there appears to be some unresolved seasonality at work. The second is that nevertheless both were weaker than one year ago. Nominally personal income rose 0.9%, while spending declined -0.2%. Since […]

– by New Deal democrat This week’s report on initial jobless claims was of particular interest, because of the issue of whether Federal employees laid off by the new Administration would cause an increase. It appears they did. Initial jobless claims rose 22,000 for the week to 242,000, and the four week moving average rose 8,500 […]

More unwelcome news in (new) house prices, while sales continue sideways trend  – by New Deal democrat I almost always start out my post on new home sales by indicating that, while they are the most leading of all housing metrics, they are very noisy and heavily revised. That was true in spades for this […]

– by New Deal democrat There was unwelcome news in this morning’s repeat home sales reports from the FHFA and Case-Shiller. On a seasonally adjusted basis, in the three-month average through December, according to the Case-Shiller national index (light blue in the graphs below) prices rose 0.5%, and the somewhat more leading FHFA purchase only index (dark […]