Tag Archives: US EConomics

Jobless claims bounce along near their bottom New jobless claims declined 16,000 to 223,000 last week. This is still 35,000 higher than the low of 188,000 set on December 4; but on the other hand is remains among the lowest weekly figures for the past 50 years. The 4 week average declined 2,000 to 253,250, which is 53,500 above its 199,750 low set on December 25: Continuing claims were unchanged at 1,621,000, 66,000 above their low of 1,555,000...

Gas prices sound a consumer warning I got a note yesterday from a fellow forecaster pointing out that crude oil prices have once again made new 7 year highs. This is something I also highlighted in my “Weekly Indicators” column on Saturday. As I write this on Wednesday morning, West Texas Intermediate Crude trades at slightly under $90/barrel, yet another new 7+ year high.  How much trouble does this portend for the economy? Potentially, a...

This is one of the times when I missed the BLS annual adjustment also. RJS was right on the money this morning in reporting it. A portion of the 467,000 was due to adjustments in December and January data. RJS, MarketWatch 666, Employers Add 467,000 Jobs in January, Unemployment Rate Rises to 4.0% The Employment Situation Summary for January from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated a decent level of job creation during the month, while the...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for January 31 – February 4 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There is an old market saying that “the cure for high prices is, high prices.” Well, commodity prices, and in particular industrial commodities and oil, are at new multi-year highs. The latter is going to feed right through into higher gas prices that will be very much noticed by consumers. And if there is...

RJS @ MarketWatch 666, Construction Spending Rose 0.2% in December after Prior Months Were Revised Higher The Census Bureau’s report on construction spending for December (pdf) estimated that the month’s seasonally adjusted construction spending would work out to $1,639.9 billion annually if extrapolated over an entire year, which was 0.2 percent (± 0.8 percent)* above the revised November estimate of a $1,636.5 billion rate annually, and 9.0...

January jobs report: huge gain in wages, huge upward revisions to past few months, limited Omicron impact Here are the three issues I was looking to see addressed in this jobs report: 1. Would last month’s “poor” 199,000 number of new jobs be revised higher? 2. Is wage growth holding up? Is it accelerating?3. In December, big decreases in the number of initial jobless claims were not reflected in a better jobs number. Would the big increase in...

History is the study of the past. We can not undo the past; but we can make use of knowledge of the past to help us understand what is going on now so as to make the right choices, to take the right actions for issues of the present now; and to better our odds for survival into the future. ——-past—————————————————–|now|———future——- Now is the present time interval (one of definable duration) between the past and the future that moves forward...

December JOLTS report: with Omicron raging, the pool of potential employees refuses to fill, meaning more record wage gains The Census Bureau has started to release the JOLTS report earlier in the month. So we got December’s report yesterday as opposed to in a week or two.   Last month I introduced the idea of a game of musical chairs, where employers added or took away chairs, and employees tried to best allocate themselves among the chairs....

Manufacturing continues strong in January; construction continued to sag in December As usual, the first data for last month starts out with the ISM manufacturing report. This index, especially its new orders subindex, is an important short leading indicator for the production sector.  In January the index declined from 58.8 to 57.6, as did the more leading new orders subindex, which declined from 61.0 to 57.9 (note the breakeven point...

Tax churn.  Or so I will suggest. There are two basic ways to improve the economic position of disadvantaged Americans using the income tax system.  The first approach, targeting, uses refundable tax credits to put more money in the hands of lower-income households.  Subsidies decrease for households with higher earnings.  The second approach is to use a Universal Basic Income, which gives refundable tax credits to everyone, regardless of...