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Looks like a weak start for 2017: From WardsAuto: Forecast: January Forecast Calls for Low Sales, High Inventory The U.S. automotive industry is expected to a have a slow start in the new year, with January light-vehicle sales down 4.4% from like-2016. … The resulting seasonally adjusted annual rate is 17.0 million units, well below the 18.3 million in the previous month and 17.4 million year-ago.…December inventory was 9.2% above same-month 2015, the biggest year-over-year...

Note the trend: Don Schlagenhauf, chief economist for the St. Louis Fed’s Center for Household Financial Stability, and Lowell Ricketts, the Center’s senior analyst, analyzed consumer credit data and found that a decline in housing-related debt offset growth in other types of consumer debt during the third quarter. “The latest data suggest that overall growth may have stalled, despite robust student and auto loan borrowing,” Schlagenhauf and Ricketts wrote. ...

Spencer England | January 25, 2017 8:24 am President Trump is not alone in blaming NAFTA for the decline in US manufacturing employment over the last several decades.  Many people on all sides of the political spectrum believe the same thing.  But as this chart demonstrates the economic data tells a very different story. In the decade after...

As far as I’m concerned, the ECB does not yet have to increase interest rates – as households still have to be able to refinance many billions high rate loans. As mister Draghi has shown, using sectoral balances, households have, unlike companies and governments not yet profited from low rates and QE! Individual EU countries have to reign in the housing market, though. Below, I’ll share some thoughts about this (as I’m a member of the ECB shadow council who gives advice on this, and I am...

Still back to the lower, pre mini spike levels. Industrial production was up due to elevated utility bills, which might explain why retail sales are low: Highlights Same-store sales growth continued the glacial pace of the prior week and was up just 0.3 percent year-on-year in the January 21 week, a sharp deacceleration from the 2-percent plus growth seen in the final weeks of December. Versus December, month-to-date January sales were down 3.5 percent, more than twice the...

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from David Ruccio The American Dream has all but collapsed under the weight of growing inequality. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for the American working-class to sustain a decent standard of living, and their children are increasingly unlikely to be better off than they are. But those who hang on to the American Dream—or at least the selling of that dream to others—believe that sending young people to the nation’s colleges and universities is the solution.  The problem, of...

Recently I put up a few graphs showing that the income of immigrants is correlated with the income of the country from which they hailed, and that this relationship is especially true for immigrants who have been in the US the longest Garrett Jones has been covering the same ground, and here he provides a bit of a review of the literature: Recently, a small group of economists have found more systematic evidence on how the past predicts the present. Overall, they...

Thomas Palley A negative interest rate policy (NIRP) appears revolutionary, but its justification rests on failed, pre-Keynesian “classical” economics. This claims that lower interest rates can always solve aggregate demand shortages and lead to full employment. Keynes discredited classical economics by showing that saving and investment might not respond, as assumed, to lower interest rates. Once all profitable investment opportunities have been undertaken, negative interest rates may...

From the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC): Apartment Markets Soften in the January NMHC Quarterly Survey — Apartment markets continued to retreat in the January National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) Quarterly Survey of Apartment Market Conditions. All four indexes of Market Tightness (25), Sales Volume (25), Equity Financing (33) and Debt Financing (14) remained below the breakeven level of 50 for the second quarter in a row. “Weaker conditions are evident...