Economy in Brief

The near-term employment environment should maintain its recent strength, according to Manpower, Inc. On a seasonally adjusted basis, the hiring index did slip to 11, but that left the 2013 outlook average up from 2012. On a not [...]

The OECD indicators paint a picture of an area that is largely making progress but very slow progress- is it progress that is too slow to be effective? This month China, a country not in the OECD area, is faltering as its indicator is [...]

The pump price for a gallon of regular gasoline fell by 5 cents last week to $3.71 per gallon (-3.1% y/y) and added to its 2 cent decline during the prior week. Nevertheless, prices have risen 46 cents (14.0%) since the mid-December [...]

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the January Job Openings & Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report, the job openings rate ticked up to 2.7% from an unrevised 2.6% in December. However, the figure remained slightly below [...]

The National Federation of Independent Business reported that its February Small Business Optimism Index rose for the third straight month. However, the advance in the seasonally adjusted index to 90.8 from 88.9 in January still left [...]

The near-term employment environment should maintain its recent strength, according to Manpower, Inc. On a seasonally adjusted basis, the hiring index did slip to 11, but that left the 2013 outlook average up from 2012. On a not [...]

German imports jumped more sharply than exports in January suppressing the German trade surplus. Still, the trend for that surplus is rising as export growth has been exceeding import growth for nearly one year. Import growth at 2.3% [...]

Since 1990, diffusion indexes of payroll employment have moved with the change in overall employment. Therefore, recent moderate payroll gains are well-grounded. For private nonfarm production industries, 63.3% added to payrolls last [...]