Angry Bear » US/Global Economics

Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

September existing home sales: a pause in the housing rebound

NewDealdemocrat | October 24, 2019 8:39 am

US/Global Economics

September existing home sales: a pause in the housing rebound

I normally don’t bother with existing home sales, since it is the least economically important of housing data, but it’s a really slow news week, so …

September existing home sales were reported at 5.38 million annualized by the NAR. While that is a decline from August’s revised 5.50 million rate, it is better than all of this past spring’s numbers, which formed the recent trough in this series (Note: this morning’s data not shown):

So the overall trend remains higher, as is to be expected with lower mortgage rates.

The NAR is squirrelly about graphs of its longer term data, but I can tell you that the peak for this expansion was approximately 5.75 million annualized sales in November 2017. Increasing interest rates in 2018, assisted by the continuation of rising prices, caused sales to declined throughout 2018.

I expect the gradually rising trend to continue so long as mortgage rates remain near multi-year lows. At the same time, high prices relative to median household income will put a “choke collar” on growth, restraining much upside.

NOTE: Tomorrow is a travel day for me, so no posting then. New home sales and initial jobless claims will be reported Thursday, so I expect to chime back in then

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The divergent nowcast and one model’s forecast at Seeking Alpha

Dan Crawford | October 23, 2019 8:32 am

US/Global Economics

by New Deal democrat

The divergent nowcast and one model’s forecast at Seeking Alpha

Over 10 years ago I found a good, quick-and-dirty way of looking at the Index of Leading Indicators. It only matters at turning points, which means, for the first time since the 2015-16 “shallow industrial recession,” it’s worth looking at now.

That, plus a concise look at the bifurcation in the producer vs. consumer economy as it stands now, is a post I’ve put up over at Seeking Alpha.

As usual, clicking over and reading should hit you with a little dose of knowledge, and me with a little dose of coin to reward me for my efforts. After all, those books I’m reading on the historical antecedants to the American Republic aren’t boing to pay for themselves!

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An Increasingly Divergent US Economy

Barkley Rosser | October 18, 2019 12:29 pm

US/Global Economics

An Increasingly Divergent US Economy

Lots of people have been huffing and puffing about whether or not the US economy will go into a recession in the near future, with Menzie Chinn and Jim Hamilton at Econbrowser saying it is now about 50-50 whether or not the US economy will go into recession by the end of 2020. I do not have a horse in that race, but I am struck that a new odd phenomenon has recently appeared in the US economy, a split between sectors regarding their performance that recently seems to be increasing.

The sectors are manufacturing, which has been declining now for several months and is the harbinger of recession. Meanwhile single family permits are up, and YOY permits overall are up by 8 percent that may well hold off any recession if it continues to accelerate. It is unclear which will win out.

So the general story of manufacturing looking to decline while housing construction is likely to rise still holds for the fairly near future.

The manufacturing decline has been widely tied to the trade wars, which would appear to be at least partly responsible. It is also the sector that through trade may be experiencing the pressures of the slowing of global growth.

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Positive housing, initial claims, and Philly Fed outweigh negative industrial production

NewDealdemocrat | October 17, 2019 1:54 pm

US/Global Economics

Positive housing, initial claims, and Philly Fed outweigh negative industrial production

So, after a nearly empty week until now, there were four economic reports this morning. Three of them were good.

First, although overall housing starts and permits declined, single family permits, the most forward looking and least volatile of the metrics, were only 3000 off a new expansion high (red in the graph below, vs. multi-family permits):

Housing’s rebound is the biggest single argument against a recession later next year.

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A Nobel for the Randomistas

Peter Dorman | October 15, 2019 6:46 am

US/Global Economics

A Nobel for the Randomistas

I don’t think anyone was surprised by this year’s “Nobel” prize in economics, which went to three American-based specialists in the design of on-the-ground experiments in low income countries, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer. I think the award has merit, but it is important to keep in mind the severe limitations of the work being honored.

The context for this year’s prize is the long, mostly frustrating history of anti-poverty projects in the field of development economics. Much of the world, for reasons I’ll put to the side for now, is awash in poverty: billions of people lack access to decent sanitation, medical care, education and physical and legal protection, not to mention struggling to put food on the table, a roof over their head and cope with increasing demands for mobility. A lot of money has been spent by aid organizations over the years to alleviate these conditions, without nearly enough to show for it. (My specialty, incidentally, has been in child labor, which has been the focus of a large piece of this work.)

There have been various reactions to the lack of progress. One has been to argue that the effort has been too weak—that we need more money and ambition to turn the corner. This is Jeffrey Sachs, for instance. Another is that the whole enterprise is misbegotten, a relic of colonialism that was always destined to fail. You can get this in either a right wing (William Easterly) or left wing (Arturo Escobar) version. (I critiqued the “left” stance on child labor here.) A third is where this Nobel comes in.

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Weekly Indicators for October 7 – 11 at Seeking Alpha

Dan Crawford | October 14, 2019 1:05 pm

US/Global Economics

by New Deal democrat

Weekly Indicators for October 7 – 11 at Seeking Alpha

My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.

The stars are aligning for the recovery from the present slowdown in the longer term. But in the meantime, the present and short term data is still soft.

As usual, clicking over and reading helps reward me a little bit for my efforts.

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Scenes from the September jobs report

NewDealdemocrat | October 14, 2019 1:00 pm

US/Global Economics

Scenes from the September jobs report

I shared the best good news from the September jobs report released last Friday: there’s a good argument that the economy has reached “full employment,” although we could do even better if real wages improved more. Today let’s look at the bad news, which comes from examining the leading indicators for employment.

That there has been a jobs slowdown is by now well established. In the last 8 months, per the more reliable establishment report, 1,135,000 jobs have been added, an average of 142,000 per month, which If we subtract temporary census hiring of 26,000, becomes 139,000. And keep in mind that the number of jobs added between March 2018 and March 2019 is going to be reduced from roughly 210,000 to 167,000 per month:

Next, the three leading sectors of employment I track are temporary help (blue in the graph below), manufacturing (gold), and residential construction (red). Here’s what they look like compared with 2018, showing the slowdown this year:

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August JOLTS report: nearly all employment measures now neutral

NewDealdemocrat | October 13, 2019 1:10 pm

Hot Topics

US/Global Economics

August JOLTS report: nearly all employment measures now neutral

The JOLTS report for August showed a decline in all metrics m/m as well as a slowing trend overall.

To review, because this series is only 20 years old, we only have one full business cycle to compare. During the 2000s expansion:

Hires peaked first, from December 2004 through September 2005
Quits peaked next, in September 2005
Layoffs and Discharges peaked next, from October 2005 through September 2006
Openings peaked last, in April 2007

as shown in the below graph (quarterly, normed to 100 as of May 2018):

Here is the close-up on the past five years (monthly):

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Medicare for All

Peter Dorman | October 13, 2019 5:49 am

Journalism

Politics

US/Global Economics

Medicare for All

The abstract for “Does Medicare Coverage Improve Cancer Detection and Mortality Outcomes?” by Rebecca Mary Myerson, Reginald Tucker-Seeley, Dana Goldman and Darius N. Lakdawalla:

Medicare is the largest government insurance program in the United States, providing coverage for over 60 million people in 2018. This paper analyzes the effects of Medicare insurance on health for a group of people in urgent need of medical care – people with cancer. We used a regression discontinuity design to assess impacts of near-universal Medicare insurance at age 65 on cancer detection and outcomes, using population-based cancer registries and vital statistics data. Our analysis focused on the three tumor sites with recommended screening before and after age 65: breast, colorectal, and lung cancer. At age 65, cancer detection increased by 72 per 100,000 population among women and 33 per 100,000 population among men; cancer mortality also decreased by 9 per 100,000 population for women but did not significantly change for men. In a placebo check, we found no comparable changes at age 65 in Canada. This study provides the first evidence to our knowledge that near-universal access to Medicare at age 65 is associated with improvements in population-level cancer mortality, and provides new evidence on the differences in the impact of health insurance by gender.

I can’t vouch for the results, not having read the article in full, but the study design looks good, provided they avoided the spurious results from higher order nonlinear relationships separated by the discontinuity.

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Real average and aggregate wages for September

NewDealdemocrat | October 12, 2019 6:27 am

US/Global Economics

Real average and aggregate wages for September

Now that we have the September inflation reading, let’s take a look at real wage growth.

First of all, nominal average hourly wages in September increased +0.2%, while consumer prices were unchanged. As a result, after rounding, real average hourly wages for non-managerial personnel increased +0.1%. This translates into real wages of 97.7% of their all time high in January 1973:

On a YoY basis, real average wages were up +1.7%, still below their recent peak growth of 1.9% YoY in February:

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