Tag Archives: US EConomics

House prices continue to surge, with affordability near its worst since the Great Recession The FHFA and Case Shiller house price indexes for May and April, respectively, were released this morning. Because housing affordability is very much an issue, let’s take a look. YoY the FHFA index is up 15.7%, and the Case Shiller national index is up 13.9%: Not shown, but recall that last week the median price for new single-family homes was...

Coronavirus dashboard for June 28: comparisons with one year ago as “delta” spreads Let’s begin this installment with a look at vaccinations by county from a different source that a reader pointed me to last week, COVIDactnow:  The urban/rural and Red State/Blue State divides are pretty obvious. Conor Kelly (whose work I was highlighting one year ago) also has a more detailed breakdown: He notes that income level also...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for June 21- 25 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. All of the important metrics for the economy remain positive. But, in addition to supply chain issues, we have to start worrying about COVID again, because the delta variant has now taken hold in up to 8 States with rising new cases. All of those States have fewer vaccinations per capita than the national average, and...

New jobless claims stall, adding to the evidence that stalling vaccinations and case counts are having an economic effect New jobless claims have been the most important weekly economic datapoint this year, as they have correlated strongly with vaccination progress. Unfortunately, that progress has largely stalled in the past month, and now new jobless claims appear to have stalled as well. This week new jobless claims declined 7,000 to...

Real personal income and spending both decline in May – but that’s OK, as it was mainly expiration of stimulus; NBER likely to declare end of recession soon The last of the 4 monthly coincident markers for whether the economy is in recession vs. expansion was reported this morning for May. Let’s take a look. Personal income declined -2.0% in nominal terms, which on top of April’s decline of -13.1%, has taken back most, not by no means all, of...

2 Months PCE Would Add 7.36 Percentage Points to Q2 GDP Angry Bear Commenter RJS and Marketwatch 666 blogger computes the impact of real PCE from this report on GDP and explains his math. The May report Personal Income and Outlays from the Bureau of Economic Analysis gives us nearly half the data that will go into 2nd quarter GDP, since it gives us 2 months of data on our personal consumption expenditures (PCE), which accounts for nearly 70%...

Coronavirus dashboard for June 17: big progress since 1 year ago; big “Delta” challenge still ahead One year ago today, in my Coronavirus Dashboard for June 17, here was my graph of cases Which I described as: As shown in the graph above, [after Arizona at 214 per million population] the remaining “top 10” are all States in the Confederacy, High Plains, and Mountain West. In order, (showing rates of new infections per million as of June...

May housing permits and starts continue down from recent peak In May housing permits (blue in the graph below), including the least volatile single-family permits (red, right scale), continued to decline from their January peak. Meanwhile, the more volatile and slightly lagging housing starts (green) increased, but remained below their March peak: The level of construction activity as high as or higher than its pre-pandemic peak is continuing....

The decline in new jobless claims stalls, as the “delta” variant is ready to strike the unvaccinated States New jobless claims continue to be the most important weekly economic data point, as increasing numbers of vaccinated people and outdoor activities have led to an abatement of the pandemic, with both new infections and deaths at their lowest point since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. I’ll have more to say on the intersection of the...

Commenter RJS and MarketWatch 666 blogger Seasonally adjusted retail sales fell 1.3% in May after retail sales for April were revised 1.4% higher . . . the Advance Retail Sales Report for May (pdf) from the Census Bureau estimated that our seasonally adjusted retail and food services sales totaled $620.2 billion for the month, which was a decrease of 1.3 percent (±0.5%) from April’s revised sales of $628.7 billion, but 28.1 percent (±0.7 percent)...