Economy in Brief

Job market improvement stuttered last week. Initial claims for jobless insurance during the week ended August 9 increased to 311,000, the highest level in six weeks. Claims during the prior week totaled 290,000, revised from 289,000. [...]

The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that their total Mortgage Market Volume Index declined 2.7% last week (-28.4% y/y). Applications remained two-thirds below the peak in September 2012. Applications to refinance an existing [...]

Total business inventories increased 0.4% in June (5.8% y/y) after an unrevised 0.5% May advance. Increases in inventories during Q2'14 picked up versus the first quarter and added 1.6 percentage points to real GDP growth. That [...]

Retail and food service sales were unchanged (3.7% y/y) during July following an unrevised 0.2% June rise. A 0.3% increase had been expected in the Action Economics Forecast Survey. Fewer sales of motor vehicles & parts limited last [...]

The worries about European growth are for good reason. Total EMU industrial production excluding construction fell by 0.3% in June after a 1.1% decline in May. In the quarter, it's rising at a 0.1% annual rate. That's pretty thin [...]

The Federal Government posted a $94.6 billion budget deficit during July of FY 2014, and roughly matched expectations in the Action Economics Forecast Survey. For the first ten months of the current fiscal year, the government ran a [...]

The price for a gallon of regular gasoline declined another penny last week to $3.51 (-1.6% y/y). Prices remained down from the $3.78 per gallon peak reached in February of last year. To account for seasonal volatility, Haver [...]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in its Job Openings & Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) that the job openings rate jumped to 3.3% during June from an unrevised 3.2% in May. The latest level was the highest since June 2007. The job [...]