Economic Data

This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor reported a surprisingly low 383,000 first time claims for unemployment insurance. This number, which is the lowest we have seen in two-and-a-half years in the U.S., was well below expectations. It…

Frederick J. Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession (McGraw-Hill, 2009) and "The Coming Collapse of the Municipal Bond…

The U.S. jobs data this month is a bit screwy. I wanted to flag something I saw because I think it is significant.  First, here is the headline. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an addition to non-farm payrolls of 36,000…

“If spending an amount equal to half of the world’s second largest GDP to buy up foreign currencies is not currency manipulation, then what is?” -Martin Wolf, Financial Times The perils of Chicago Many moons ago, long before I…

Andy Lees of UBS's London-based Equity Derivatives group had an interesting post this morning on the push in China to maintain sufficient energy resources in order to maintain economic growth. He writes: Yesterday China gave the…

By Rick Bookstaber A few months ago I discussed the failing of econophysics, and more generally, the economic paradigm that treats people like computers and views economic dynamics like physics. The natural follow up question is, “What can…

The latest Nationwide House Price Index update is out showing a decline of 0.1% in January 2011. That brings house prices down 1.1% since this time last year. Nationwide has a new Chief Economist, Robert Gardner, who writes: "The…

The PMI Index for the January 2011 Manufacturing ISM Report On Business® released this morning increased to 60.8% from 58.5% in December. This was well above consensus estimates, which looked for a dip to 57.9%. With 50 seen as the…

By Win Thin and his Emerging Markets Strategy Team at Brown Brothers Harriman India: Economic and Currency Snapshot Macroeconomic Update: GDP rose 8.9% y/y in both Q2 and Q3, and is expected to grow about 9% in 2010 and 8.5% in 2011.…

Here is my mantra regarding so-called 'unsustainable' debt levels. I feel strongly about this topic so I'll repeat it and show you a few statistics on consumer debt from the recent US government data: oor quality growth can continue…