– by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. “Consumers Back Off – Slightly” There was little change this week, but restaurant reservations – the first expense I would expect stretched consumers to cut back on – did slacken a little bit. And withholding tax payments over the past four weeks barely […]

– by New Deal democrat I’ve been ambivalent about whether the mania for AI is a Boom or a Bubble. That’s because whether its use is transformative or, like Steve Jobs’ claims that the Segway would revolutionize transportation, not so much.  But what has become increasingly clear is that virtually the entire economy has been […]

 – by New Deal democrat I just wanted to drop a brief note about this morning’s PPI report. In May headline producer prices rose 1.1% for the month (the second such increase in a row), and on a YoY basis increased 6.5%. Final demand goods prices are up 9.1% YoY, and final demand services up 4.9%: […]

 – by New Deal democrat Last week I wrote that “we’re coming up on the one year anniversary of that change of regime, so it will be interesting to see if the negative YoY comparisons continue, or if they fade away. This week’s numbers are noteworthy in that regard, because they suggest that – maybe – […]

 – by New Deal democrat First of all, my usual caveat: although they constitute about 90% of all housing sales, I don’t pay too much attention to existing sales because they are not nearly so important as new home sales, since the latter involve much more economic activity in the building process, plus more landscaping […]

 – by New Deal democrat It’s the Monday after the jobs report, and as usual there is no new data today. So let’s take a look at a few of the salient trends from Friday’s report. First of all, this was the fourth good report in a row. Furthermore, it isn’t just goods producing jobs […]

Weekly Indicators for June 1 – 5 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat The large majority of the high frequency indicators remain positive. Interestingly, though, one of the early warning signals for credit tightening, the Chicago Fed’s Leverage Index, is now at a level that in the past has more often meant a […]

– by New Deal democrat My Big Theme for the past few months has been that the AI Boom (or possibly bubble) is counterbalancing a stagnant or even shallowly recessionary rest of the economy. The bottom line is that the May report was the third in a row that not only confirmed that, but suggested […]

– by New Deal democrat We are – maybe! – finally seeing some of the unresolved post-pandemic seasonality reasserting itself as to initial jobless claims. For the record, initial claims rose 13,000 to 225,000 last week, the highest number since early February. The four week average rose 6,500 to 214,750. With the typical one week delay, […]

 – by New Deal democrat The economically weighted ISM manufacturing + services indexes have become one of my favorite datapoints. That’s in part because the former has a nearly 80 year history of being a solid leading indicator, although somewhat attenuated since the start of the Millennium. But the latter now also has a long […]