Friday, May 16, 2025

Housing permits and starts still rangebound, but with units under construction down almost -20%, is the last shoe finally dropping?

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   - by New Deal democrat In April total permits (dark blue in the graph below) declined -69,000 on an annualized basis to 1.412 million, wh...
Thursday, May 15, 2025

Industrial and manufacturing production suggest front-running production has peaked

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  - by New Deal democrat The final datapoint for today is industrial production, including its important manufacturing component.  Last mont...

Real retail sales turn down in April, but continue to reflect consumers’ front-running of tariffs

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   - by New Deal democrat  Next up in today’s slew of data is retail sales. This is one of the most important indicators I look at, because...

Jobless claims: more of the same

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   - by New Deal democrat After a long data drought, there are many releases today. I’ll start with jobless claims. Initial claims were unch...
Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Average and aggregate nonsupervisory real April wages continued to fuel the consumer

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   - by New Deal democrat Now that we have April’s consumer inflation data, let’s update real wages for average American families. In April ...
Tuesday, May 13, 2025

April CPI: the second victorious report in a row

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   - by New Deal democrat Last month, I wrote that the March CPI report was the one we had been waiting for for the past three years. April...
Monday, May 12, 2025

Measures of median wage growth show why consumers have still been able to outpace tariff increases

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   - by New Deal democrat We’re still in a new data drought. CPI gets released tomorrow, and then a slew of data on Thursday. In the meantim...
Saturday, May 10, 2025

Weekly Indicators for May 4 - 8 at Seeking Alpha

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   - by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. Unsurprisingly, the big news this week from the high frequency...
Friday, May 9, 2025

More fuel to help consumers deal with tariffs: real aggregate nonsupervisory payrolls likely increased again in April

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   - by New Deal democrat One of my favorite indicators is both a significant update from last week’s jobs report, as well as a good explana...
Thursday, May 8, 2025

New jobless claims well-behaved, but continuing claims trend higher

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   - by New Deal democrat Initial jobless claims returned to a well-behaved range this week, down -13,000 to 228,000. The four week moving a...
Wednesday, May 7, 2025

Leading employment sectors from the April jobs report - no definitive signs of peaking

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 - by New Deal democrat Let’s take a belated look at some of the more important datapoints that came out of last Friday’s employment report ...
Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Consumers continue to front-run tariffs, now with an energy tailwind

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   - by New Deal democrat  Back in March I took a look at how producers and consumers reacted to periods of high political policy uncerta...
Monday, May 5, 2025

Eveonomically weighted ISM averages continued slow deceleration in April despite rebound in servies

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    - by New Deal democrat  Because manufacturing is much less important to the economy than in the decades before the Millennium, the econ...
Saturday, May 3, 2025

Weekly Indicators for April 28 - May 2 at Seeking Alpha

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   - by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. Aside from the declines in the April regional Fed reports of g...
Friday, May 2, 2025

April jobs report: another good month, with little impact from “liberation day” tariffs - yet

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   - by New Deal democrat  My question over the past year had been whether “decleration” into a “soft landing”would turn into “deteriorati...