ThinkstockThe market has a nearly live reading on consumer sentiment and confidence. The Reuters/University of Michigan reading on consumer sentiment is out. This is a preliminary reading for the month of May rather than…
ThinkstockThe federal government keeps a “Drought Monitor” for every state. Thursday, California’s water problems became so bad that the entire state was categorized as having “severe drought” — or worse. Portions of the state had…
ThinkstockMost Americans think that the state they live in is also a good place for racial and ethnic minorities to live. In a recent poll of all 50 states, the highest scoring state is…
Ed Brown, via Wikimedia CommonsThe U.S. Labor Department is out with yet another weekly jobless claims report, but this one was a much better-than-expected surprise. Weekly claims plummeted by 24,000 to 297,000 in the…
ThinkstockThe U.S. Labor Department released its consumer inflation report on Thursday morning. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the key measurement of inflation at the retail level, and it is likely to be monitored…
ThinkstockThe Producer Price Index (PPI) measures wholesale inflation, and the April readings are mostly in line with those from March. The headline PPI for final demand was up 0.6% in April, above the 0.2%…
ThinkstockAfter a weather-related slowdown in the first two months of the year (and part of the third), it turns out the business inventories for the month of March are proving that America is back…
ThinkstockMost investors and savers worry about inflation through time. The problem is that deflation may be even worse. The latest round of import and export prices for the month of April confirms that we…
ThinkstockThe National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) Tuesday morning reported that its small business optimism index for April rose 1.8 points from 93.4 in March to come in at 95.2. This is the first…
ThinkstockVermont’s legislature did what many members of Congress and the president would like to do. It raised the minimum wage in the state to $10.10 from $8.73. The federal minimum wage is $7.25. The…
ThinkstockThe U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) at noon Friday, offering the agency’s first look at the U.S. and global crop supply and demand prospects…
ThinkstockA reading on wholesale trade was released on Friday morning by the U.S. Commerce Department. This is for the month of March, a period that would have been weather-impacted and would have been under…
While the trend for payrolls and unemployment has been better, the great compression in weekly jobless claims had not been continuing at the same rate as of late. Thursday’s weekly jobless claims report from…
ThinkstockThe people of Utah as the most generous in America. According to a new poll from Gallup: Utah leads U.S. states in reported charitable giving, with nearly half of its residents saying they had…
ThinkstockIf bonds are rallying, yields are dropping, often due to worries that the economy will slow down or that bonds will be more desirable than stocks. It does not always work out that way,…