Economy in Brief

The U.S. labor market is firmer, but still fragile. Payrolls rose a modest 151,000 last month after a 41,000 September decline. Encouraging news came from private sector payrolls. They rose 159,000 after gains of 107,000 and 143,000 [...]

The Euro-Area PPI spurted in September. But as the August PPI had been flat there is no acceleration in three-month growth rate after the September 0.5% spurt in the headline. None of the main PPI categories show three-month inflation [...]

Improvement in the labor market continues hard to come by. Initial claims rose to 457,000 last week and more-than-recovered the prior week's decline to 437,000 which was revised up from 434,000. Nevertheless, the figures remained near [...]

Along with an improvement in output last quarter, labor productivity also improved. Labor productivity in the nonfarm business sector rose 1.9% (AR) and recouped its 2Q decline. The rise exceeded Consensus expectations for a 0.9% [...]

Unit sales of light vehicles jumped an unexpected 4.2% last month versus September. The rise to 12.26M units (SAAR) left monthly sales at the highest since September of 2008 except for the incentive-charged sales spurt in August of [...]

The U.S. service sector continued to improve last month. The October Composite Index for the service and construction sectors from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) rose to 54.3 from 53.2 in September. The latest beat [...]

The UK service sector diffusion index has risen to 53.19 in October from 52.80 in September. The index is not particularly strong, standing only in the 64th percentile of its range. Earlier this month the EU indices showed that the [...]

The outplacement firm of Challenger, Grey & Christmas indicated that the level of layoffs during October increased slightly to 37,986 but that remained near the smallest number since June of 2000. The level remains down by more than [...]