– by New Deal democrat As promised, let me parse the JOLTS survey for May, which was reported yesterday. As a quick refresher, this survey decomposes the employment market into openings, hires, quits, and layoffs. In 2024 the data were most consistent with a “soft landing,” but the actions of the new Administration, especially on trade, […]
– by New Deal democrat The last significant data for the first half of 2025, personal income and spending for May, was released this morning. It was the first month that reflected the impact of Tariff-palooza!, and boy howdy was it impacted. Not a single metric was positive. One metric was unchanged; everything else was negative. […]
– by New Deal democrat This morning gives us the last of our three measures of home sales, prices, and inventory, new home sales. These are the most important of the three because while they are very noisy and heavily revised, they are the most leading of all housing metrics, and so they can tell us about […]
– by New Deal democrat We can safely say that the front-running of tariffs is over. As usual, real retail sales is one of my favorite indicators, because it tells us so much about consumers, and since consumption leads employment, it gives us information about the trend in that as well. And this morning’s report for […]
– by New Deal democrat Even before the new Administration took office in Washington, my focus had been on whether the economy would have a “soft” or “hard” landing, i.e., recession. That has only intensified by the utter chaos of tariff-palooza! So my focus now is looking for “hard” vs.”soft” data indicating its impact. This month’s […]
– by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. As I wrote about here this week, the supply chain effects of the tariffs have finally bled through to rail shipments, and probably trucking as well. Meanwhile, despite all the uncretainty, as we saw yesterday with the personal income and spending report, consumers […]
– by New Deal democrat Let me start this post by picking up where I left off yesterday. In yesterday’s post I suggested that an absolute YoY decline in intermodal rail freight might well show up in this morning’s report from the AAR. And as the below chart shows, that’s exactly what happened, with intermodal traffic […]
Interesting issues occurring on May 28th which ended up in the courts. Also, people are finding ways to make money as Trump plays with on-again and off-again tariffs. As you probably know, the ruling on tariffs by the U.S. Court of International Trade was set aside by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. […]
– by New Deal democrat One of the main reasons I include the last two years when I write about initial and continued jobless claims is that a distinct unresolved post-pandemic seasonality has developed. Even after seasonal adjustment, claims have tended to rise in the late spring towards the summer, and then decline beginning in late […]
– by New Deal democrat A few days ago, Prof. Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser posted the below graphs comparing the time that hard vs. soft data reacted to economic shocks: As you know, I have been looking at hard “high frequency” data to see if any of the effects of Tariff-palooza! have shown up yet. And […]