Coronavirus dashboard for February 23: the Omicron wave has receded by almost 90%; what about deaths? No economic data today (Feb. 23), so let’s update the situation with COVID-19. My usual source of graphs, 91-Divoc, is down today, so less elaborate, cluttered graphs from the NYT site to follow. The Omicron wave peaked in the […]
New 50+ year low in continuing jobless claims [Programming note: I will post about new home sales later this morning.] Initial claims (blue) declined 17,000 to 232,000 (vs. the pandemic low of 188,000 on December 4). The 4 week average (red) declined 7,250 to 236,250 (vs. the pandemic low of 199,750 on December 25). Continuing […]
House price increases still strong, but clear deceleration from peak The Case Shiller and FHFA house price indexes were reporting this morning, covering the period through December. As you all know well, my mantra is that interest rates lead sales, and sales in turn lead prices. Here’s this month’s update. The monthly increase in the […]
You’re reading the right blog, Presidents‘ Day edition No economic data today due to the Presidents’ Day holiday, so here is something else I ran across over the weekend. Former Federal Reserve Economist Joseph Gagnon critiqued a Paul Krugman column about the cause of inflation. He notes that the causes of this inflation are both […]
A housing warning: affordability, at long last, is approaching its housing bubble nadir If current price and mortgage trends hold, we are about 6 to 12 months away from matching the very worst housing affordability at the peak of the housing bubble. Let’s start with a comparison of existing home sales (blue, reported today for […]
Housing permits jump; the last hurrah before mortgage rates bite? This morning’s report on January housing permits and starts highlighted the unique divergence between the two. As I have often pointed out, permits are the more leading and less noisy of the two reports, so I usually highlight them, especially single family permits. But in […]
A note on producer prices and (possibly) cooling inflation One point I make from time to time is that, with seasonally adjusted data, YoY comparisons can miss, or at least lag, turning points. We *may* have such a situation developing with producer prices as evidenced by this morning’s report (Feb. 15). On a YoY basis, […]
The current trend in both cases and deaths in the US has me the most hopeful I have been in over 6 months. Here’s why. Nationwide, cases have declined to 150,000, only 30,000 above their level just before The Omicron wave started, and about 10,000 less than their Delta peak: The Omicron wave has been […]
The return of the “Oil Choke Collar”! For the first five years after the end of the Great Recession, one of the staples of my analysis was the concept of the “oil choke collar.” By that I meant that typically recessions had occurred after there was a sudden and sharp upward spike in the cost […]
Real wages continued to stall in January, portending a consumer slowdown, but don’t reverse Let me follow up on yesterday’s post about the January CPI by talking about “real” wages. Since both average real hourly wages and consumer inflation increased in January by 0.6%, real hourly wages for non-supervisory workers were flat month over month: […]