Economy in Brief

Improvement in the labor market may have picked up steam this month. Initial unemployment insurance claims fell unexpectedly to 284,000 during the week ended July 19 from a revised 303,000 in the prior week, earlier reported as [...]

The French business climate indicator from the INSEE survey fell in July, continuing a streak of erosion. The indicator was last lower in September of last year. It sits in the 39th percentile of its historic queue of data back to [...]

The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that their total Mortgage Market Volume Index improved 2.4% last week (-31.9% y/y), making up roughly half of the prior week's decline. Applications remained two-thirds below the peak in [...]

The price for a gallon of regular gasoline declined five cents to $3.59 last week (-2.4% y/y). Prices remained lower than the $3.78 per gallon peak reached in February of last year. To account for seasonal volatility, Haver Analytics [...]

The U.S. House Price Index from the Federal Housing and Finance Agency (FHFA) improved 0.4% during May. The year-to-year growth rate fell to 5.5% from an 8.5% peak in July of last year. During the last twelve months, prices remained [...]

Sales of existing single-family homes increased 2.6% (-2.3% y/y) to 5.040 million (AR) during June from 4.910 million in May, last month reported as 4.890 million. Sales, nevertheless, remained 6.3% below the peak reached last July. [...]

Consumer prices gained 0.3% (2.1% y/y) during June following a strong 0.4% May rise. The reading matched consensus expectations in the Action Economics Forecast Survey. Consumer prices excluding food and energy ticked 0.1% higher [...]

Italy's Industrial orders slipped in May after increases in back-to-back months. In May foreign orders fell hard while domestic orders slipped by just 0.2%. But the string of declines for domestic orders is longer. The consistency of [...]