March existing home sales continued the slow process of rebalancing in the housing market

 - by New Deal democrat

Existing home sales are not that important for forecasting purposes, since they have much less economic impact than new home sales, because the main effect is simply a change in ownership. But there has been an ongoing shortage of housing for over a decade, which was only exacerbated by the pandemic. So I mainly look at this data for evidence of a rebalancing of the market.

And in March there was further evidence of that rebalancing.

Like new home sales, existing home sales have been rangebound for the past 2 years, in reaction to mortgage rates remaining in the 6%-7% range. In February they were near the top of that range at 4.26 million annualized. In March they retreated towards the bottom of that range, at 4.07 million, so the rangebound trend continued:

But as indicated above, the main issue has been a chronic lack of inventory. As shown in the graph below, this trend has been going on for at least 10 years, well predating the pandemic. Unlike sales, this series is not seasonally adjusted, so it must be looked at YoY. In March inventory continued its slow climb from its 2022 Covid lows, at 1.330 million units, a 19.8% increase, and the highest March reading since 2020:

Nevertheless inventory remains well below its pre-2014 levels (not shown), which typically were in the 1.7 million to 1.9 million range, which means that the shortage still exists.

This shortage is still creating upward pricing pressure, but that pressure is abating somewhat. Like prices, this data is not seasonally adjusted and so must be looked at YoY. Here is what the last 10 years look like:

In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic in 2021-22, prices increased as much as 15% or more YoY. After the Fed started its sharp hiking regimen, prices briefly turned negative YoY in early 2023, with a YoY low of -3.0% in May of that year. Thereafter comparisons accelerated almost relentlessly to a YoY peak of 5.8% in May of 2024, before decelerating to 2.9% in September.

Here are the comparisons since:

October 4.0%

November 4.7%

December 6.0%

January 4.8%

February 3.6%

In March this deceleration continued, with a YoY% gain of 2.7%, the lowest such gain since September 2023.

This is good news, but as indicated above pricing pressures will remain until the shortage of inventory is resolved.

The bottom line is that existing home sales continued the slow rebalancing of the housing market. Next week we will see if the repeat sales indexes buttress this evidence.

More front-running in March, for durable goods orders; but more manufacturing contraction in April

 

 - by New Deal democrat



This morning we got more hard data on manufacturing, one from March, one for this month.

In March new durable goods orders (blue in the graph below) soared higher by 9.2% to an all-time high. This was all about front-running tariffs, because excepting motor vehicles they were unchanged (not shown). Meanwhile core capital goods orders (red, right scale) increased only 0.1%, -0.2% below their January peak:

Since this pulled orders forward from future months, there must inevitably be a giveback in the months ahead. But this does tell us that Q1 was not negative for manufacturing at least.

Meanwhile the Kansas City Fed reported on manufacturing in its district for this month declined slightly further into contractionary territory again, at -4:

Note that this is still above its average reading for the past several years.

The new orders subindex rose +1 to a still very contractionary -11.

The average for the four regional Feds reporting manufacturing so far is -13. For new orders the average is -17. Needless to say, this is consistent with a recession in the manufacturing sector.

The Kansas City Fed will update its general business conditions survey, that includes services, tomorrow.

Jobless claims remain well behaved

 

 - by New Deal democrat

Jobless claims remained well behaved last week, as they increased 6,000 to 222,000. The four week moving average declined -750 to 220,250. With the typical one week delay, continuing claims declined -37,000 to 1.841 million, at the low end of its range over the past 10 months:

As usual, the YoY% changes are more important for forecasting. There, initial claims were up 6.2%, the four week average up 3.0%, and continuing claims up 4.0%:

These are all consistent with a slowly expanding economy.

Since initial claims lead the unemployment rate by several months, here’s our updated look at that, including initial plus continuing claims:

There is no indication of upward pressure on the unemployment rate in the next several months.

Finally, although I won’t bother with a graph this week, after several days being negative YoY, for the past week the stock market has rebounded to higher YoY, finishing yesterday up +6.0%. Thus the “quick and dirty” recession forecasting model indicates continuing expansion for now.

And now, for some decent economic news: new home sales steady, prices slowly deflating

 

 - by New Deal democrat

In ordinary times, new home sales are important because while they are very noisy and heavily revised, they are the most leading of all housing metrics. They remain important even presently because they can tell us about the underlying upward or downward pressure on the economy going forward one year or more. 

By way of background, remember that housing responds first and foremost to mortgage rates, and since those have been rangebound generally in the 6% - 7% range for 2.5 years, so have new home sales in the range of 611,000-741,000.

In March, new home sales increased 7.4% from a slightly downwardly revised February, to 724,000 units annualized, continuing the rangebound behavior. As per usual, the below graph compares with with single family permits (red, right scale), which lag slightly but are much less noisy:

.

Both demonstrate the recent range bound behavior. 

Over the same 2.5 year period of time, prices at first stalled, and then began a very slow deflation. This continued last month, as on a non-seasonally adjusted basis, the median price of a new single family home declined -7,900 to 403,600, with the exception of last November the lowest price in three years:

Although I won’t bother with a graph this month, on a YoY basis, the median price of a new home is continued to decline, down -7.5%.

Builders are much more able to respond to market pressures, and - tariffs aside for the moment - this continues to make new homes relatively much more attractive than the constricted existing homes market, with its continuing upward price pressure.

Finally, recessions have in the past happened after not just sales decline, but the inventory of new homes for sale - which also consistently lag - also decline (as builders pull back:

So it is good news that last month’s slight downward tick was revised away, and the inventory of new homes for sale rose 3,000 to a new 17 year high of 503,000 annualized:

Because manufacturing has been flat to declining in the past three years, construction has been important in the continued expansion of the economy. This month’s report tells us that while new home construction is not increasing significantly, it is not meaningfully decreasing either, and is not showing any sign of any imminent recession.

Regional Feds so far on general business conditions in April: the worst since July 2022

 

 - by New Deal democrat

Three of the five regional Feds that report on their region’s state of the economy have now reported for April. With one exception in the data, everything is negative.

On the manufacturing side, the NY Fed reported last week that now orders had gotten “less bad,” improving +6.1 to -8.8, which is actually in line with most of the monthly readings from the NY Fed since the beginning of 2022:

The Philly Fed, on the other hand, reported that new orders collapsed to -34.2, which is the worst reading of the past 10 years except for the two Covid lockdown months in 2020:

And this morning the Richmond Fed reported that new orders had declined -11 to -15. Aside from last summer, this is in line with the worst readings since the Covid lockdowns as well:

The average of the three for April is -19.3.

Since manufacturing is now far less important to the economy than services, to gauge the impact of T—-p’s economic moves, I am now also following the services indexes as well.

Last week the NY Fed reported that services deteriorated very slightly, by -0.5 to -19.8:

This morning the Philly Fed reported *positive* general business conditions, up +1.3 to +6.9. This is the sole positive report for any regional Fed this month:

And the Richmond Fed also reported this morning that business conditions declined -16 to -30 (note below graph is not updated yet):

The average of the three for April is -14.3.

In general the three regional Fed’s are suggesting that the broader services economy is in the worst shape since 2022, when inflation was at its worst post-pandemic. Since that even did not quite spill into recession territory, we shouldn’t get too far over our skis at this point.

Will this be the week the hard data turns down?

 

 - by New Deal democrat

Typically this is a week where I pay the most attention to incoming housing data in the form of both new and existing home sales, but because we live in “interesting times,” this week it’s different.

The Sword of Damocles hanging over the entire economy is policy uncertainty, for unfortunately obvious reasons. In case you haven’t seen this elsewhere, there actually is a “policy uncertainty index” that is updated daily. Below I show its entire history, both daily (dotted line) and biweekly (solid blue):

On a biweekly basis, there has been more policy uncertainty in the past month than there has ever previously been in the history of the Index, including in the middle of the Covid lockdowns and even more surprisingly, more than during the near financial freeze-up of the economy in autumn 2008.

Needless to say, this is not conducive to undertaking big new projects. Further, because of the incipient trade war, there has been front-running of tariffs that will reverse - and may already have started to do so.

Which means that this Thursday’s durable goods orders report for March, although hardly up to the minute, will assume added importance. Here’s what new orders for durable goods (blue), durable consumer goods (gold), and core capital goods (red) look like since the pandemic:

Most importantly, core capital goods orders have been rising in the past six months. We’ll see on Thursday if front-running caused a further increase in March.

The other big data points will be coming throughout the week from the regional Feds.

On Tuesday, Richmond will report both manufacturing and services conditions for this month. Philadelphia will also report on services. 

On Thursday, Kansas City will report on manufacturing, and on Friday it will report on services for this month.

Because a downturn in manufacturing, unless particularly severe, is not enough anymore to cause a broader downturn in the economy, the coincident measures of business conditions including services for April from the various regional Feds assume additional importance. The Philly Fed’s manufacturing report last week was horrible, and the NY Fed’s reports on both manufacturing and services also indicated contraction.

Finally, it will be worth paying additional attention to the AAR’s weekly rail carloads week report on Thursday, because there are indications that trans-Pacific shipping from China has already declined by more than half. If so, the next effect will be on rail shipping out of the West Coast. 

Weekly Indicators for April 14 - 18 at Seeking Alpha

 

 - by New Deal democrat

My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha.

It remains notable how quickly many of the short leading indicators have turned up. But there has been no discernible hit to consumption.

As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment as to the state of the economy, and put a penny or two in my pocket for my efforts in organizing and presenting it to you.

“A large, slow-moving gun fired at the economy and the bullet is still in the air”

 

 - by New Deal democrat

A poster named Micah on Bluesky has written “the China tariffs were a large, slow-moving gun fired at the economy and the bullet is still in the air”

By this he is refering to the consequences of China banning the export of rare metals used in components like microprocessors. Apparently this has already impacted trans-Pacific shipping, and will be affecting US domestic freight traffic in a few weeks, per “Freight Alley:”

“ Many truckers I've spoken with don't realize how quickly container volumes have collapsed. Starting in May, port freight out of California will be almost eliminated. It’s going to be a bloodbath in dray, followed by intermodal, and then a collapse in I-20 and I-40 trucking.”

“May 2020 had 51 shipments blank sailings. Over 80 so far in April 2025. COVID will look like good times.”

To refresh, here are the two regional manufacturing reports for April so far:

And here is the latest (March) for residential construction:

And here is the one report on April services so far, from the NY Fed:

These last three graphs are not expressions of sentiment, they are reports about hard data. 

Still no significant negative effects on consumer spending through last week:

And we saw Wednesday that there was lots of front-running by consumers, especially buying cars, in March.

And we also saw yesterday that there has been no uptick in layoffs.

That’s what it looks like this week. 

Stay tuned.

Housing permits and starts remain rangebound, while construction declines further; expect employment to turn down soon

 

 - by New Deal democrat

The housing market has historically been led by mortgage rates. And since those have been relatively rangebound for most of the past 2.5 years in the 6%-7% range, housing permits and starts have similarly followed.

This morning those trends continued. Total permits (dark blue in the graph below) increased 23,000 on an annualized basis to 1.482 million, while the less volatile single family permits (red, right scale) number declined -20,000 to 978,000. The slightly lagging and much more volatile starts number (gray, narrow) declined a sharp -170,000 to 1.324 million annualized:

All of these are virtually unchanged from where they were a year ago:

Which is consistent with the lack of major changes in mortgage rates (gold, inverted, *10 for scale):

In the past year, I have paid ever more attention to the number of housing units under construction (blue in the graph below), which follows permits and starts with a further, sometimes considerable, lag; and which is the closest proxy for the actual economic impact of new housing construction. This declined another -19.,000 annualized, and is now -18.7% below its highest post-pandemic reading in October 2022:

In the above graph I also show the last shoe I would expect to drop before a recession, employment in housing construction (red, right scale). This has continued to increase, and made another post-pandemic record last month. I do not expect this levitation to last forever. As shown in the below historical graph, several times the delay has been between 1 and 2 years:

Since the significant downturn in units under construction began about 18 months ago, I suspect the turn in employment will take place within the next few months. 

And needless to say, if construction including construction employment turn down at the same time as manufacturing, that would be an excellent recipe for the beginning of a recession. 

Jobless claims remain well-behaved, while Philly region manufacturing … isn’t

 - by New Deal democrat

Initial jobless claims continued to be well-behaved last week. Per this morning’s report, they declined -9.000 to 215,000, while the four week moving average declined -2,500 to 220,750. With the typical one week delay, continuing claims increased 41,000 to 1.885 million - which, despite the big weekly increase, is right in line with their typical range over the past half a year:

On the more important YoY% basis for forecasting purposes, initial claims were up 1.9%, the four week average up 2.7%, and continuing claims up 5.3%:

All of these are consistent with a slowly expanding economy.

Taking our first look at their implication for next month’s jobs report, on a YoY% basis unemployment should have increased about 5% to ~4.2% (i.e., 3.8%*1.05=4.2%), which would be unchanged from the March report:

But if jobless claims are behaving well, manufacturing in the Philadelphia Fed region, including its new orders component, fell off a cliff. The headline number was a poor -26.4, while new orders declined to -34.2(!). Below I show the Philadelphia Fed’s new orders component (blue) in comparison with that of the NY Fed’s index (gray):

Their average is equivalent to what we saw in 2016, and at their nadirs of 2023 and 2024, and not as low as during the Covid lockdowns. While none of the equivalent readings in the past ten years equated with recessions, nevertheless this strongly suggests that the surge from front-running tariffs has ended and, depending on what we see from the three other regions that will report later this month, may auger the beginning of a downturn.

March manufacturing production also shows evidence of tariff front-running

 

 - by New Deal democrat

The former King of Coincident Indicators, industrial production, has faded ever since the “China shock” at the beginning of the Millennium. Downturns in production almost always coincided with the onset of recessions beforehand. Since then, there have been several big downturns, in 2015-16, 2019, and a smaller one in 2023-24, without recessions having occurred.

The headline number in this morning’s report for March, a decline of -0.3%, is somewhat misleading. That’s because it includes utilities, which had all time highs in January and February more than 5% higher than at any time before the pandemic, and over 3% higher than any prior post-pandemic measure (possibly a combination of an particularly cold winter and crypto mining), declined -5.8% in March. The below graph is normed to 100 as of the pre-pandemic record in April 2018:

When we strip out utilities and just look at manufacturing production (red in the graph below), March saw a 0.3% increase to a new post-pandemic record, in contrast to the headline decline (blue):

I suspect the big increases in February and March in manufacturing, like this morning’s retail sales numbers, were about front-running T—-p’s tariffs. Which means that like retail sales, production might have been pulled forward from the next few months, which may lead to whipsaw declines.

I think the best way to look at both pieces of data reported this morning is simply to note that expansion continued in March, and we’ll have to watch the incoming data especially carefully in the next few weeks and months.

In that regard, the New York Fed published its regional “Business Leaders Survey” for April this morning, headlining that:

“Business activity in the region’s service sector declined significantly for a second consecutive month, according to firms responding to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s April Business Leaders Survey. The survey’s headline business activity index came in at -19.8, its lowest level in more than a year. The business climate index dropped nine points to -60.7, its lowest level in more than four years, suggesting the business climate was considerably worse than normal.”

Here is the accompanying graph for the headline number:

Similar non-manufacturing surveys will be reported by the Philly, Richmond, Kansas City, and Dallas Feds over the next two weeks, and may give us our first hints of tariff-related declines in activity to the 70% of the economy that is services.

In the meantime, tomorrow we will get our first important look at the housing construction sector in March.

March retail sales were all about front-running T—-p’s tariffs

 

 - by New Deal democrat

Normally real retail sales is one of the indicators I treat as most important, because it tells us so much about consumer behavior, which is not only 70% of the economy, but also has a lengthy track record for leading both employment and the coincident indicators for recession.

Not this month. In March real retail sales told us that consumers were front-running tariffs, Bigly.

For the record, nominally retail sales increased 1.4% in March. Since consumer prices declined -0.1%, real retail sales increased 1.5%. Even more telling, ex-autos retail sales rose 0.5% nominally and 0.6% in real terms. This was the biggest increase in sales in 2 years (blue in the graph below). Because of shelter distortions in the CPI, recently I’ve also begun including real retail sales ex-shelter (gold), which also increased the most in two years. This also telegraphs that real consumer expenditures on goods, which won’t be reported until the end of the month, will also increase sharply (red):

In other words, there was a big rush to buy vehicles in March. Anecdotally, in my neck of the woods a major auto dealer’s advertising was all about hurrying up to beat the tariffs.

In absolute terms, real retail sales were also at their highest in two years, with the exception of last December:

Since when real retail sales are positive YoY, historically there is no recession on the immediate horizon, here is that measure:

Of course, this might well be another exception, since front-running in March pulled demand ahead from later this spring and summer. Sharp declines in the next several months are therefore quite possible, distorting the series to the negative.

The state of the short leading indicators: why there’s no “recession watch” - yet

 

 - by New Deal democrat

Over the weekend, in my high frequency “Weekly Indicators” post, I wrote that in the past month, the bulk of the short leading indicators had turned from being positive to negative. Which of course raises the question, should I go on recession watch?

To help resolve that, I took a look at the whole constellation of short leading indicators, including those that only come out once a month. To cut to the chase, the indicators that have reacted are the financial and interest rate sensitive ones. The “hard” indicators - and even a few of the “soft ones” - have not moved yet.

First, let me briefly update several of the high frequency indicators that have moved, starting with the “quick and dirty” forecast method including stock prices and jobless claims:

After turning negative YoY for several days last week, stocks have rebounded. Officially for my purposes they are a neutral indicator, because they made an all-time high as recently as late February. It will only be if they fail to surpass that high in the next month that they will turn negative.

This is the US$, which I discussed yesterday, and  made a new 52 week low intraweek last week:

Next is industrial commodities (basically, commodities minus oil):

This as well has made new 52 week lows in the past several weeks. This occurs either when supply increases (as it did in 2023) or demand is expected to contract, which is the most likely explanation at present. 

As I wrote yesterday, the credit spread between Treasury’s and corporate bonds has also blown out:

Although I won’t bother with the graphs, several other short term leading indicators, including the average of the regional Fed manufacturing indexes and their new orders components, have been negative for awhile - which has also been the case for the ISM manufacturing index. And the aggregated St. Louis Financial Stress index sharply increased last week. But the similar Chicago Fed indexes show no sign of stress at all.

Where we haven’t seen a downturn is in manufacturers’ new orders for durable goods or for consumer goods (these are also “official” leading indicators in the index):

Note that these are only updated through February, and won’t be updated until later next week. 

And recall that several leading indicators contained in the employment report, in the form of construction and goods-producing jobs generally, just made new peaks in March:

Finally, one last historical “official” short leading indicator that is very hard to reproduce now is net business formations vs. terminations. The Census Bureau does update formations monthly, but they are not seasonally adjusted and must be viewed YoY (particularly because of huge seasonal shifts during the Holiday season). These were just updated for March last week:

There’s no sign of stress at all in high propensity formations.

On the flip side, bankruptcy statistics do get updated every week, and will probably be updated later today. These have regular variations, peaking at the end of each month, as well as tailing off during the Holiday season. There is also a variation YoY depending on what day of the week a month begins and ends, so they are best averaged monthly:

It is not unusual for bankruptcies to increase during the course of an expansion, as the total number of businesses in the US increases with population and growth. The issue becomes when there is a significant acceleration of that trend. Averaging the four weeks in March through the beginning of April, there has been no such acceleration.

The bottom line as of now is that I would want to see some spreading out of weakness from the financial and interest rate data into the “hard” economic data before a “recession watch” would be warranted.

The US bond market sends a warning; has the US crossed an economic Rubicon?

 

 -by New Deal democrat

Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has called T—-p’s tariffs “an act of warfare against the entire world.”

Perhaps it is not surprising that in the past week, the entire world has responded. Among other things, per Eric Michael Garcia, “China has suspended exports of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets, threatening to choke off supplies of components central to automakers, aerospace manufacturers, semiconductor companies and military contractors around the world.”

But most significantly, per Bloomberg yesterday, China has had every incentive to weaponize its $760 Billion (!) in US Treasury holdings.

And it may have done so.

Let me start with this graph, via Wolf Street, of the US Treasury yield curve:

This is almost the worst configuration you could imagine. Not only has the short end more deeply inverted (historically a leading sign of recession), but also the long end has risen in yield (also a leading sign of recession in other models). About the only worse configuration would be if the Fed had to raise interest rates further to combat inflation or to defend the US$.

We all know that last week US Treasury yields rose sharply - by 0.40% from 3.99% to 4.40%, rising as high as 4.60% intraday:

This has had some immediate economic impacts, most notably on mortgage rates, which on Friday rose back over 7%:

This is almost certainly going to impact mortgage applications and new housing sales and permits, hurting that important leading sector.

Additionally, spreads between US Treasury’s and investment grade corporate bonds have widened significantly (red), and the spreads of both compared with high yield speculative corporate bonds (gold) have widened as well:

This is typically a sign of financial stress and often (but not always!) a short leading indicator of impending recession as well:

But as has already been noted in other corners, the sell-off in the bond market could also impact the standing of the US$. Here is a graph of the US$ vs. the Euro (blue) and Chinese Renminbi (red) over the past 10 years:

Note that over that time the general trend was the strengthening of the US$ against both currencies.

But now let’s focus on the last year:

On T—-p’s inaururation day, the Euro was almost 1:1 parity with the US$. Since then the Euro has appreciated, and last week it gained another 0.25 from 1.08 to 1.105 against the dollar. Meanwhile the Renminbi in the last several weeks has decoupled, depreciating in value vs. the US$.

Why would the Renminbi lose value? Maybe because China was selling US Treasury’s and buying other currencies. 

Although I won’t show the graphs, US Treasury’s haven’t been the only bonds that sold off last week. So did longer maturities in Canada, the UK, Japan, and Australia.

But two bonds conspicuously stood out, having sharp downtrends in yields.

One was all of the bonds in the Euro area. Below I show Germany, but there are similar charts for France and Italy (!):

So it looks like there was a move out of Treasury’s and into Euro area bonds.

But the other similar graph was yields on Chinese bonds, which typically can only be traded internally in China:

So on the global scale, US bonds as well of those of its closest trading partners sold off, while Euro area and Chinese bonds went entirely in the other direction.

As shown above, this caused the Euro to appreciate against the US$ - but not the Chinese renminbi.

If this were just China humiliating T—-p, it might be worth a good chuckle. But the entire US economy is likely to suffer because of this move. T—-p will probably surrender in this fight, but rationality is not his strong suit. And Xi may want the US as a whole humiliated as well.