Weekly Indicators for September 25 – 29 at Seeking Alpha – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Interest rates continued to head higher, with mortgage rates briefly going over 7.5%. With the long leading indicators having worsened, With the decline in commodity (including gas) prices over, I am looking for […]
Consumer spending holds up well in August, despite ending of disinflation – by New Deal democrat As I have repeated for the past several months, in the current economy the personal spending and income report is just as important as the jobs report. That’s because, despite the downturn in manufacturing production and many parts […]
Initial jobless claims remain higher on a YoY basis, but do not suggest near term recession – by New Deal democrat Initial jobless claims rose 2,000 last week to 211,000. The 4 week moving average declined -6,250 to 211,000. With a one week lag, continuing claims rose 42,000 to 1.670 million: Although this appears very […]
Why the public still views inflation as a major problem, despite the official numbers – by New Deal democrat This is the topic I indicated last week I wanted to write about more at length. Paul Krugman wrote last week about the disconnect between most economists, who see inflation declining, and voters, who still see […]
New 20+ year record high mortgage rates begin to impact home sales; bifurcation in new vs. existing home prices continues – by New Deal democrat In addition to updated reports on new home sales and prices, and existing home prices this morning, there’s some very important news on mortgage rates. Namely, at 7.51%, mortgage rates […]
Weekly Indicators for September 18 – 22 at Seeking Alpha – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. With interest rates at or near multi-decade highs, and the existing home market completely seized up, the background financial condition have trended even worse. Meanwhile the shorter term indicators may be getting reading […]
The Big Picture of the housing market, and its almost complete bifurcation, in 3 easy graphs – by New Deal democrat I want to spend some time commenting on the broader issue of why the public perceives inflation is still rampant, even though almost all official measures show it rapidly decelerating, and even completely absent […]
With sales near 25 year lows, the huge divergence between the existing and new home markets continues – by New Deal democrat The drastic bifurcation between the new and existing home markets continues. Existing home sales fell to 4.04 million annualized in August, the lowest level of the entire past 10+ years except for last […]
Initial jobless claims: unresolved seasonality obscures cautionary YoY comparisons – by New Deal democrat For the last few weeks, I have been highlighting that there is likely some unresolved post-pandemic seasonality in the initial claims numbers. That certainly looked like the case this week, as a sharp decline mirrored a similar sharp decline 52 weeks […]
Using the stock market and unemployment as an easy and timely coincident recession indicator – by New Deal democrat My fellow forecaster Bob Dieli has a measure he calls “DeltaDelta,” basically an average of the YoY% change in the stock market and the unemployment rate (which hopefully he won’t mind me mentioning here). It called to mind […]