– by New Deal democrat In last month’s note on new home sales,  I concluded that “This is all but unique. Historically a recession will not occur until inventory turns down again. But to reiterate, housing has been recessionary for a year, and yet no recession has occurred.” Earlier this month, I described the housing market […]

 – by New Deal democrat [Administrative note: yesterday’s problem, in which the platform would not allow me add a new post, seems to have spontaneously resolved, although “officially” the blog metrics show “0 posts” in all its history, Cross your fingers that this issue has gone away permanently.] I discussed the stock market’s very positive performance earlier […]

 – by New Deal democrat In It appears that both producer and consumer inflation are going to continue at elevated levels, despite the actual *de*flation in June. Here’s a look at the average of the New York and Philadelphia Fed’s prices paid (blue) and prices received (orange) diffusion manufacturing indexes:  In July, the average for prices […]

 The manufacturing sector of the economy continued to improve in June – by New Deal democrat There’s a brief hiatus from new data early this week, so let me briefly look at the manufacturing economy, for which industrial production was reported on Friday. To briefly recap my overall position: despite the chaos coming out of […]

Weekly Indicators: All Timeframes Positive Despite Increase in Oil Prices Despite oil prices heading back north of $80/barrel this past week, the underlying fundamentals in all time frames remain positive, including most importantly consumer spending. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment as to the state of the […]

 – by New Deal democrat Last week I wrote at length about how the entire housing market had reached an equilibrium, where almost all of the metrics were more or less flat. Meaning that this important long leading sector for the economy was about as neutral as it could be. This morning’s data on housing permits, […]

 – by New Deal democrat Let’s take a look at retail sales, especially real retail sales, one of my favorite economic indicators, which was updated for June this morning. This is because consumer spending is about 70% of the economy, and also because historically consumption leads employment. Let’s see what happened during a month that gas […]

– by New Deal democrat Let’s take our usual weekly look at jobless claims, along with stock prices 1/2 of my “quick and dirty” forecasting method. And they continued to forecast expansion. Initial claims declined -8,000 for the week to 208,000, with the four week moving average declining -4,750 to 214,250. With the typical one […]

“Producer price declines are ‘less good’ than consumer price declines, and on net that’s ‘bad‘”  – by New Deal democrat I pay a lot less attention to producer prices than to consumer prices. Partly that is because in the past few decades, the PPI has tended to be coincident with the CPI rather than leading […]

– by New Deal democrat Never look a gift horse in the mouth. June’s CPI was that kind of gift horse, reversing all of the factors that have recently surged during the Iran war. As a bonus, inflation in shelter (1/3rd of the weight of the index) continued to abate. Let’s start with the overall view. […]