The Angry Bear

Construction spending, manufacturing, and temp jobs all decelerate further or decline On Sunday I said, “Construction spending … should follow housing permits and starts with a delay of several months. But, oddly, even though starts in particular have continued to languish, spending has come back strongly since last November. I’ll be looking to see if that anomaly continues, or whether construction spending reverts to its historical pattern.” I also wrote...

The John Bates Clark Award And Me Getting Old Yes, this is going to all be about me! ? So, before getting to me, me, me, let me congratulate Emi Nakamura of the UC-Berkeley economics dept for receiving the John Bates Clark Award. It seems to be well deserved for her innovative and influential work on looking at high frequency detailed micro data sets to get more accurate estimates of macro variables, including both inflation rates and fiscal...

Median wage and salary growth stalls in Q1, while overall positive trend remains intact UPDATE: real household income declined The Employment Cost Index is a median measure of wages, and also total compensation, for the 50th percentile worker. Thus it escapes the “Bill Gates walks into a bar” issue with average measures. Sunday I wrote that “It has been improving for several years now, and I am expecting it to continue.” Not quite. While both the wage...

My discovery that half the annual increase in the not seasonally adjusted core CPI occcurs in the first quarter and that simply doubling the first quarter increase gives you an amazingly accurate estimate of the December to December reading work again in 2018. In 2019 it is saying the annual increase in the core CPI will be about 2% — the same as the widely accepted consensus. Figure 1

[unable to retrieve full-text content]FoxConn, Valerie Bauerlein. Microsoft News “Six miles west of Lake Michigan in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin lies a cleared building site half again as big as Central Park and ready for Foxconn Technology Group’s $10 billion liquid-crystal-display factory. Contractors have bulldozed about 75 homes in Mount Pleasant and cleared hundreds of farmland acres. Crews are widening […]

What I’m watching for this week This week is going to be a really busy one for economic data. I’m not going to be able to do detailed posts on everything. But because in the past couple of months most of the data has gone against my “2019 slowdown” scenario, I thought both in the interests of transparency, and to put down a few benchmarks to anchor my analysis, I’d write down what I am looking for in each release. Monday – personal income for March;...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 22 – 26 at Seeking Alpha My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. The data has been improving since the beginning of March, and continued to improve this week. Although at the moment the prevailing sentiment, based on new stock market highs, and yesterday’s surprise 3.2% Q1 GDP, seems to be “happy days are here again!”, my suspicion is that the intermediate and lagging data is going to fade....

New home sales suggest housing bottom is in New home sales are extremely volatile, and extremely revised, but they do have the advantage of probably being the single most leading housing statistic, ahead of permits and starts. So it is noteworthy that new home sales for March rose to 692,000, below only one month in late 2017 when they hit their expansion high of 712,000: I have been looking for the bottom in housing, as mortgage interest rates have...

Commercial and industrial loans: another sign of a slowdown? There are lots of cross-currents in the economy right now. At the absolute tip of the spear is the decline in interest rates since November, which has led to an improvement in some of the housing market metrics. In the shorter-term outlook, a simple quick-and-dirty metric of initial jobless claims (new 49 year lows) and the stock market (just made new all-time highs) suggests all clear. But...