- by New Deal democrat
There’s no new important data again today, so let me update a few high frequency indicators in which I am looking for signs of weakness.
First, Redbook’s consumer retail sales weekly report came out this morning, showing a 4.7% YoY increase. This is one of the 8 lowest increases in the past 52 weeks:
Clearly the front-running of tariff price increases we saw in March and April is over. On the other hand, even a 4.7% increase YoY is still higher than the inflation rate.
Meanwhile, he resumption of collections on student loan payments has had a big effect not just on those loans, but also on auto loans and credit card balances:
All of the money that has to go to the resumption of payments on student loans is money that is not available for other purchases.
Weekly bankruptcies have increased in the past several months, but not anything out of the ordinary seasonally or compared with the pattern in the past several years:
Turning to the supply chain, the trend in the updated weekly rail intermodal data shows a continued fall-off compared with last year:
Note that seasonally rail traffic should be increasing, not decreasing.
But surprisingly, inbound container traffic to the Port of LA has completely rebounded in the past several weeks:
Finally, there’s no significant sign yet of a YoY decline in new business applications, although in the past week high propensity applications were down -0.1% YoY:
So, while there are some signs of a slowdown, there is no definitive evidence of an actual downturn in economic activity at this point.