Economy in Brief

Pessimists concerning the outlook for the next six months among German institutional investors and analysts now outnumber optimists for the first time since March of 2009. In September the ZEW indicator fell to -4.3% from 14.0% in [...]

Consumers are getting back on their feet. Retail spending rose last month by 0.4% following a little-revised 0.3% July increase. The last was slightly greater-than-expectations for a 0.3% increase and came despite a 0.7% drop in [...]

Over six months the OECD and the US trend-adjusted LEIs are now much weaker. The OECD prefers to use its measures as gauges over six month periods. On that basis either growth is slowing or an actual slow down is setting in depending [...]

The Federal government ran a budget deficit last month of $90.6 billion pulling the YTD deficit to $1,169 billion. That was diminished from the deficit of $1,267 billion during the first eleven months of FY'09. The deficit's decline [...]

The latest economic news from China suggests that the deceleration of growth in industrial production and in retail sales evident in the first half of this year may be coming to an end. The year to year gain in industrial production, [...]

PPI inflation is not in the gun-sights of any central bank that targets inflation. But it's an important ingredient in the inflation mix. Most measures of inflation tend to have the same cycles so in each there is a reason to take [...]

Foreign trade numbers do bounce around, don't they? The July U.S. foreign trade deficit improved to $42.8B from a little-revised $49.8B in June. That improvement reversed virtually all of the June deepening which helped trade deficit [...]

The German harmonized CPI rose by 0.2% in August and gained 0.9% Yr/Yr. The German domestic inflation measured by its CPI rose by 0.,1% and gained 1% Yr/Yr. The domestic measure posted a core inflation reading of 0.2% and of 0.7% [...]