– by New Deal democrat My “quick and dirty” economic status indicator is the stock market (still making new all-time highs) and initial jobless claims, which are also still positive for the economy despite being in an apparent uptrend. Last week initial claims rose 8,000 to 229,000, their second highest level in the past 9 […]

– by New Deal democrat I never used to pay much attention to the ISM non-manufacturing report. That is partly because it only has a 20 year history, and partly because it seems to be more coincident than leading: But because manufacturing has faded so much as a share of the US economy, with at […]

 – by New Deal democrat I’ll write about today’s ISM non-manufacturing report later, but first I wanted to follow up with several more graphs based on yesterday’s JOLTS labor report for April. Basically, I didn’t want to leave the impression that the labor market was in any way sub-par based on those numbers. With that […]

 – by New Deal democrat The JOLTS report for April showed most metrics rebounding slightly from March lows, with the exception of the “soft data” job openings. The overall picture is that hiring is weak relative to the past five years, but so are layoffs, and voluntary quits are equally relatively strong, balancing them out. […]

 – by New Deal democrat As usual, the month starts out with important data on manufacturing and construction. The news was mixed this month and weighted more to the downside in my opinion. First, the ISM report on manufacturing declined again slightly to 48.7. This is the second month in a row that this index […]

Weekly Indicators for May 27 – 31 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. None of the high frequency indicators made any meaningful change this week. The short term outlook continues to be positive. As I wrote yesterday in my summation of the personal income and […]

 – by New Deal democrat Personal income and spending have become one of the two most important monthly reports I follow. This is in large part because the big question this year is whether the contractionary effects of Fed tightening have just been delayed until this year, or whether the fact that there have been […]

 – by New Deal democrat Initial jobless claims rose 3,000 last week to 219,000. More importantly, the 4 week moving average rose another 2,500 to 222,500, the highest level in 9 months. With the usual one week lag, continuing claims rose 4,000 to 1.791 million: On the one hand, it does appear that claims have been […]

 – by New Deal democrat We’ll get weekly unemployment claims tomorrow, and the very important personal income and spending report Friday, before we begin the slew of reports for the beginning of June next week. But since there’s a slow news day today, let’s take a bigger picture look at the state of the economy. […]

 – by New Deal democrat The FHFA and Case Shiller repeat sales indexes are the last home sales and price data for the month. Two months ago I wrote that “for the next seven months the comparisons will be against an average 0.7% increase per month in 2023. Because house price indexes have shown a […]