Economic Data

I wrote you last week after the third consecutive elevated jobless claims report, saying this was a definite harbinger of a weak jobs report. This has proved true. While March's gain of 120,000 jobs was revised up to 154,000 and…

A slew of manufacturing data was released today in Asia and Europe to go along with the Manufacturing data we saw yesterday in the United States. The data show a divergence of economic fortunes that demonstrates the severity of Europe's…

The US manufacturing ISM surprised the market in a favorable direction. Rather than soften like the consensus expected, the diffusion index rose to 54.8 from 53.4. This represents the strongest showing in eleven months.

Here is the video everyone is talking about, Ron Paul and Paul Krugman debating the economy and economic policy. Enjoy.

The mood has turned against austerity in the euro zone because it is now rightly seen as anti-growth. The question is what next. Here I will hazard a few predictions of where euro zone policy is headed including a EuroTARP.

The agenda in the euro zone is changing. The likely outcome of the weekend elections in Greece and France are just as much an effect as a cause of the shift in the agenda. For the first time since the crisis began, the German insistence on…

The GDP numbers for the US came out again and they were weaker than anticipated, coming in at 2.2% for real GDP growth instead of the 2.5% expected. Nominal GDP growth was only 3.7%. That is not bullish for shares.

"Real final sales" and factory production continued to be supported by inventory building . Governments continued to shrink their spending, and they sucked -0.60% from the headline number. This report shows per capita disposable income is…

The details are a bit better as household consumption was stronger at 2.9% after a 2.1% pace in Q4 11. This accounted for about 2 percentage points of the 2.2% growth. How is the consumption being financed? Real disposable income rose 0.4%…