– by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. The yield curve is now almost entirely un-inverted, but in part because longer term interest rates have risen (not such a good thing). Meanwhile a variety of short leading indicators stepped on rakes this week, which may be noise, or may be […]

 – by New Deal democrat Adjusted for inflation, both personal income and spending came in positive once again in November. But under the hood, the report looked a little tepid, and while it certainly wasn’t recessionary, the data was consistent with what I would expect later in the cycle of an expansion. For the record, real […]

Jobless claims: with a dash of seasonality salt, trending towards weakness  – by New Deal democrat As expected, jobless claims declined from one week ago, as the delayed Thanksgiving week seasonality moved out of the numbers. Initial claims declined -22,000 to 220,000, while the four week moving average increased 1,250 to 225,500. With the typical […]

 – by New Deal democrat The very important construction data from the long leading housing sector was mixed this morning for November. The most leading datapoint, permits, increased 86,000 on an annualized basis to 1.505 million. Even more importantly, single family permits, which have the least noise and most signal of any of the datapoints, […]

Industrial production continues to slide  – by New Deal democrat Industrial production declined for the third month in a row in November, down -0.1%, while October was revised downward another -0.2%. Manufacturing production on the other hand increased 0.2% in November, but September and October were revised downward a combined -0.3%, so on net this was another […]

Real retail sales on the cusp of breaking out of their multi-year doldrums  – by New Deal democrat Consumption leads employment, and as I reiterated yesterday real per capita retail sales has a history as a long leading indicator. Which means that retail sales for November, which rose 0.7% nominally, continues its recent strong string […]

 – by New Deal democrat I haven’t “officially” updated my take on the long leading indicators – those that forecast a recession at least one year beforehand – in almost two years. That’s because the hurricane force tailwind of the supply-side deflationary unlinking of the global supply chain completely swamped everything else. So if I […]

Weekly Indicators for December 9 – 13  – by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. While the short-term forecast and nowcast have remained relatively constant, the “action” has been in the long leading indicators – some things good, some bad. The biggest thing that happened this week is that the […]

 – by New Deal democrat With the update on inflation earlier this week, let’s take a look a real average wages and real aggregate payrolls. Plus there is a significant update to my yellow flag caution on the employment situation. First, nominally nonsupervisory wages rose slightly under 0.3% in November, while consumer prices rose slightly […]

– by New Deal democrat As is so often the case this time of year, seasonality likely played havoc with this week’s new jobless claims. Last year Thanksgiving was November 23rd; this year it was the 28th, putting it in a different week for many statistics. So the jobless claims this morning were for the […]