– by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog Most of the commentary you will read about Q1 GDP that was released this morning will be about the core coincident components. For that I will simply outsource to Harvard’s Prof. Jason Furman: “much of the slowdown was in non-inertial items like inventories (-0.35pp) and net exports (-0.86pp). […]
– by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog [Note: I’ll put up a post discussing Q1 GDP later today.] Initial and continuing claims continued their snooze-fest this week. Initial claims declined -5,000 to 207,000, continuing their nearly 3 month long range of between 200-220,000 per week. The four week average declined 1,250 to 213,250. This […]
– by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog First off, let me reiterate that my focus this year is on manufacturing and construction. That’s because these are the two sectors the waxing and waning of which have almost always determined if the US economy is growing or not. By contrast, for the past half century or […]
– by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog As per my usual caveat, while new home sales are the most leading of the housing construction metrics, they are noisy and heavily revised. That was true again this month, as sales (blue in the graph below) increased almost 9% m/m to 693,000 annualized, after February was revised downward […]
– by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog This is an update of some information I last posted several months ago. Real median household income is one of the best measures of average Americans’ well-being. However, the official measure is only reported once a year, in September of the following year. So right now the most […]
– by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog I neglected to put this up Saturday, so here it is now. My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. There continues to be a fair amount of churn and noise in the short leading and coincident time range. Nevertheless, the underlying theme is one of positivity. Aside […]
– by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog The bifurcation of the new vs. existing home markets continued in March, per the report on existing home sales and prices yesterday. Remember that, unlike existing homeowners, house builders can vary square footage, amenities, lot sizes, and offer price and/or mortgage incentives to counteract the effect of […]
– by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog For the last 8 months, initial and continuing claims have been remarkably consistent. Initial claims have varied between 194,000 and 228,000, and continuing claims have with the exception of three weeks right at the new year varied between 1.787 million and 1.829 million. That rangebound trend continued […]
– by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog Industrial production, one of the premier series the NBER has historically used to declare recessions vs. expansions, has faded in importance since China was admitted to regular trading status in 1999. As you can see in the first graph below, both total and manufacturing production peaked in […]
– by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog There was a big decline in housing starts last month, and a smaller but significant decline in permits. Whether that signifies a change in trend or just noise is the issue. I lean towards the latter. To wit, in reaction to both January and Februarys’ housing construction report […]