Economic Data

Real quick here. I saw the jobless claims data today and thought they looked pretty good. But, I decided to go back to my 2008-2009 practice of sifting through the raw data for both initial claims and continuing claims. The numbers weren't…

Equities continued their rally today, both in the US and globally. While the US rally was impeded by bad news for Boeing, the S&P 500 did eke out a gain on the back of a rally in tech. Cisco, for example, is up 29% since it bottomed on…

It took the dramatic downshift in non-farm payrolls today for people to wake up to the drip-drip of weak jobs data coming out of the US. This put the equity market into a funk and caused bond yields to sink back to where they were on…

The February 2019 Non-Manufacturing ISM data were very bullish. Both the headline and the major subindices showed a lot of strength. And for me that indicates the 0.3% number on the Atlanta Fed GDPNow tracker will move up markedly as more…

Stalled outYou probably saw this but the Atlanta Fed came out with its first Q1 GDPNow estimate. And it's starting at a 0.3% level. Here's the chart. GDPNow is a nowcast. So it can change dramatically. And it isn't always very close to…

I have a number of threads to address here. The first is that we got two big pieces of economic data out of the US this morning, one backward looking and the other coincident or forward looking. And I want to break down. My overall take is…

A detour to the other side of the pond I have two big picture issues on my mind this morning. The first is the US economy and the US policy response. I think the Neil Irwin piece in the New York Times encapsulates a lot of the thinking on…

I wanted to switch things up a bit for today's post and focus in the news. What I am going to do is present you with news as presented by traditional media. And then I am going to give you 'my take' on the story. Hopefully, this will…

The Federal Reserve's about-face on rates between December and January looks a lot more rational in the context of the US economic data released today. We saw US retail sales unexpectedly fall in December, posting the worst drop in nine…

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