Economic Data

In July, I blogged on an interesting take on how employment affects equity returns during cyclical recoveries by Van Hoisington and Lacy Hunt. Their thesis was that a recovery in which employment lags the overall upturn significantly is…

The September 2009 Manufacturing ISM Report On Business showed the manufacturing sector and economy expanding.  But no matter, the markets wanted more. Equities sold off in a major way today. We’re talking over 200 points on the Dow…

Today’s jobless claims report should dispel the notion that the labor market in the United States is getting significantly better.  Initial jobless claims rose again to 551,000 from 534,000 the week prior.  The 4-week average is…

The latest jobless claims data is in, with initial claims registering 530,000 and continuing claims coming in at 6.1 million.  These figures are well off the business cycle highs of a few months ago but still quite elevated. …

Let’s say I run a company. For the sake of argument, we’ll call it a shoe store in New York City. I am making $100,000 net per year now. But, I look around me and see huge opportunity for growth. So I go to my bank and ask for a loan to…

Back in April I told you I anticipated an uptick in GDP in part because of changes in inventories - massive change in the inventories. At the time, I thought I was going out on a limb by suggesting we could see positive GDP numbers in Q3…

The jobless claims numbers have been telling us the same thing for weeks now, namely that the employment market is still weak but that layoffs are gradually slowing. But,  the unadjusted number of initial claims dropped 59k last week…

The U.S. Department of Labor confirmed that for yet another week average jobless claims remain in the 560-580K range where they have been for two months. Initial claims for the week ended Sep. 5 were down to 550,000, a decline of 26,000…

The U.S. economy lost 216,000 jobs in August according to figures released by the Department of Labor. This brought the unemployment rate up to 9.7% from 9.4% in July.  Despite the large rise in the headline unemployment rate (U-3),…

The Department of Labor reported that jobless claims in the latest week decreased 4,000 from a revised 574,000 in the previous week.  The figure was higher than analysts anticipated. Initially, the last week was reported as 570,000.…