- by New Deal democrat
We got two of our final most important reports of 2019 this morning. Both were positive, one strongly so.
Starting with the best and most forward-looking news, housing permits and starts both improved strongly in November:
I’ll have a more detailed report up at Seeking Alpha later today, and I’ll link to it here once it’s up. The bottom line is that lower interest rates have re-ignited the housing market, and that good news is going to flow through the economy in 2020. [UPDATE: Seeking Alpha article is up here ]
Industrial production, the King of coincident indicators, was also up a sharp +1.1% in November (blue in the graph below). Most of that was the end of the GM strike, but even without that, production was up +0.6%:
One important drawback in this number, though, is that manufacturing production, while up for the month, is still lagging (red in the graph above) and if anything, appears to still be in a slight downtrend.
All in all, this tells us that right now we are in a shallow manufacturing recession, but that the situation in the economy overall should improve as we head out of winter towards summer next year.
