Coronavirus dashboard for June 21: watching the States with flat or increasing rates of new cases For the past week I have been sounding the alarm about the economic impact of the “delta” variant of COVID. We are probably already beginning to see its impact on the case count in several States, with many more […]
Coronavirus dashboard for June 17: big progress since 1 year ago; big “Delta” challenge still ahead One year ago today, in my Coronavirus Dashboard for June 17, here was my graph of cases Which I described as: As shown in the graph above, [after Arizona at 214 per million population] the remaining “top 10” are all […]
May housing permits and starts continue down from recent peak In May housing permits (blue in the graph below), including the least volatile single-family permits (red, right scale), continued to decline from their January peak. Meanwhile, the more volatile and slightly lagging housing starts (green) increased, but remained below their March peak: The level of […]
The decline in new jobless claims stalls, as the “delta” variant is ready to strike the unvaccinated States New jobless claims continue to be the most important weekly economic data point, as increasing numbers of vaccinated people and outdoor activities have led to an abatement of the pandemic, with both new infections and deaths at […]
Industrial production on the verge of exceeding pre-pandemic level Industrial production is the King of Coincident Indicators. It is the single datum that most frequently coincides with the NBER determination of the beginning and end of recessions. In May, total production increased +0.8%. Manufacturing production increased +0.9%. Both current readings are the highest since the […]
May retail sales decline, but 10%+ gain in retail sales since the onset of the pandemic remains intact [Note: I’ll comment on industrial production in a separate post later] I feel like I could simply repost my retail sales piece from one month ago, because the story is the same: at first glance, May’s retail […]
The spike in inflation is not a concern – yet By now you’ve probably already read a fair amount of commentary on yesterday’s consumer inflation report for May. I’m going to cut to the chase as to my take right off the bat: 1. The primary driver of this inflationary spike is supply bottlenecks rather […]
Coronavirus dashboard for June 9: the high correlation between partisan lean, vaccination rates, and new cases No big economic news today, so I wanted to follow up on Monday’s post, in which I described the correlation between the number of new COVID cases and States in which there were high vaccination rates vs. ones with […]
Coronavirus dashboard for June 7: a Tale of Two Pandemics: the Vaccinated States vs. the Idiotic States The drive towards “herd immunity” via vaccination has slowed to a crawl. The slowing is almost entirely driven by Trump-voting States in the South and West. Those Idiotic States are continuing to suffer from an ongoing pandemic, while […]
May jobs report: almost all positive, but not good enough HEADLINES: 559,000 jobs added: 492,000 private sector plus 67,000 government. The alternate, and more volatile measure in the household report indicated a gain of 444,000 jobs, which factors into the unemployment and underemployment rates below. The total number of employed is still 7,629,000, or 5.0% […]