This morning we got two important monthly September reports: industrial production and retail sales.

I have more to say about industrial production, and some general economic analysis about retail sales, which are pending at Seeking Alpha. I will post a link once that article goes up. UPDATE: Here’s the link: Link

Just to start, here is are CPI adjusted retail sales. You can see that they have actually jumped once the Congressional stimulus kicked in, and have remained well ahead of pre-pandemic levels:

Figure 1

Today marked the biggest increase in new jobless claims in two months, and one of the two biggest increases since May, while the slightly lagging continuing claims continued to decline.

On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, new jobless claims rose by 76,670 to 885,885. After seasonal adjustment (which is far less important than usual at this time), claims rose by 53,000 to 898,000. The 4-week moving average also increased by 8,000 to 866,250:

Here is a close-up of the last four months highlighting the overall glacial progress in initial claims since the beginning of August:

Average deaths last 7 days: 714*Actual cases probably more like 14 million, or over 4% of the US populationSource: COVID Tracking ProjectToday let’s take a look at the most recent upsurge in COVID not just in the US, but in the entire West.Here is the 7 day average of new cases per capita in the US, Canada, and the 5 most populous countries in Europe:

Every single country, even Germany, is experiencing an upsurge. France, Spain, and the UK are having an even worse outbreak than the US.

In September Consumer prices rose a “normal” 0.2%, the first such typical increase since the pandemic began (blue in the graph below):

For the past 40 years, recessions had typically happened when CPI less energy costs (red) had risen to close to or over 3%/year. We are nowhere near that now (last 15 years shown in graph):

There is no economic data today due to the Columbus Day observance.

So let me drop this graph of a metric I have been trying to find, of college educational attainment by age demographic, that I finally came across a couple of days ago:

It is commonplace that among Whites at least, support for Democrats is highly correlated by a college education. What is unclear is whether that is actually a function of education itself, or is simply confounded by age group.

Total confirmed US infections: 7,605,218*
Average infections last 7 days: 46,869
Total US deaths: 212,762

*Actual number is probably 5 to 7 million higher, or about 4% of the total US population

In the last 4 weeks, the average number of new infections has risen again. Here is the breakdown by regions:

Here is the same for deaths:

Today marked yet another week of glacial progress in initial jobless claims, at levels worse than the worst weekly levels of the Great Recession.

On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, new jobless claims rose by 5,312 to 804,307. After seasonal adjustment (which is far less important than usual at this time), claims fell by 9,000 to 840,000, another new pandemic low. The 4-week moving average also  declined by 13,250 to a new pandemic low of 857,000:

Here is a close-up of the last two months highlighting the glacial progress in initial claims during the past 7 weeks:

At 10 a.m. Eastern time we’ll get the JOLTS report for August. I plan on posting on that later today, but in the meantime here’s an update on the Midwest “Blue Wall” that failed in the 2016 election.

Figure 1