Economy in Brief

From 2008 Germany's consumer climate has continued to rise with some fluctuations, but even the global recession and financial crisis failed to make much of a dent to that trend. After that brief interruption due to the financial [...]

Consumer sentiment from the Reuters/University of Michigan survey rebounded slightly in the second half of November - to 75.1 from the early-November reading of 72.0 and October's 73.2. The market consensus had looked for a slightly [...]

U.S. durable goods orders fell 2.0% in October, in line with market expectations, after an upwardly revised 4.1% monthly jump in September. A wide swing in transportation orders (mostly aircraft) was behind both the September increase [...]

Italian consumer confidence rebounded in November, but it is still in a bad way. The level of the index has a rank percentile value of 23.7% which means it has been lower only about 24% of the time and that is not a good standing. The [...]

Consumer confidence fell further in November - to 70.4 after having plunged in October from September's 80.2. The outsize October move had been attributed mostly to the federal government shutdown and budget battle that had transpired [...]

US housing permits for both September and October were released today, with the release of September data having been delayed by the federal government shutdown (October 1-16, 2013). However, housing starts data for September and [...]

Pending home sales continue to show weakness. The number of homes on the market for sales has dropped for five straight months. The number of homes for sale has contracted by 1.2% over the past year. There are still year-over-year [...]

Germany's Ifo continues to power higher. It is engaged in its second upswing in its cyclical recovery since the end of the financial crisis. In this `second wave up' the Ifo is locked into a milder upgrade that it had earlier, but the [...]