New York State manufacturers have faced deteriorating business and have scaled back expectations for the second half of 2012, according to August’s Empire State Manufacturing Survey. About 22% of manufacturers said business improved during the month,…
The Labor Department has reported the level of wholesale inflation measured by the Producer Price Index. The reading for the month of July came in at +0.3% on the headline report, but the core…
We have already seen some data on inventories, gross domestic product and the trade deficit. Now we are seeing the results for the July import prices. This came down by 0.6%, rather than the…
The report on wholesale trade in the month of June is now out, but we have already seen some of this in trade deficit data and in the most recent Q2 GDP preliminary data.…
It almost seems too good to be true, but the U.S. trade balance for the month of June came in far better than many were expecting. For many years the market largely has ignored…
More decent news came out of the Labor Department this Thursday as the weekly jobless claims totaled 361,000 for the past week. The only problem is that we already saw the nonfarm payrolls gains…
Media reports regularly rank the country’s states in terms of their current economic situation, health, jobs and even water quality. But what about their future? That’s what Gallup attempted to find out. On Tuesday,…
In videotaped remarks for a meeting of international economists this morning, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke argued that economic measurement “must encompass measures of well-being and its determinants,” as well as the aggregate data…
Will the United States be a country in which many people have low-paid jobs for more than another generation? Or can a combination of luck and public policy prevent that? The opposing views were highlighted in…
The Institute For Supply Management is out with its July reading on the services sector. The ISM’s nonmanufacturing report came in at 52.6% for the overall index. This was up from the 52.1% reading…
The Markit/CIPS purchasing managers’ index (PMI) released today indicated that the service sector in the United Kingdom grew at its slowest pace in 19 months in July. This casts fresh doubt over whether the…
Retail sales in the eurozone came in better than expected, but growth fell off sharply from the previous year, as consumers in the region struggled with the effects of the economic downturn. The EU…
The International Monetary Fund still sees growth remaining positive throughout 2012 and 2013. Unfortunately, this pesky “fiscal cliff” and the Euro area crisis are listed as the main risks to the IMF expectations. The…
The report on factory orders is out, although we would caution that this is June data and we have already seen so many manufacturing reports from various regional reports that already show July data.…
We have another contraction from the Institute for Supply Management. The ISM reported that July’s manufacturing PMI came in at 49.8, versus a Bloomberg consensus target of 50.2 for the month. June’s report was…