Economy in Brief

Like peas in a pod...NOT! -- Despite the similarity in their overall cyclical behavior very different forces are afoot in the Italian and French industrial sectors. Trends in France - French consumer spending is blowing through hot [...]

The September U.S. foreign trade deficit improved to $44.0B following its little-revised deterioration to $46.5B during August. The figure was narrower than expectations for $45.0B. For all of Q3 the deficit averaged $44.4B versus [...]

Japan's Economy Watcher's index fell in October as the bottom fell out of the current conditions index. That index is now in the bottom 60th percentile (top42 percentile) of its High/Low range. By queue some 70% of the values for the [...]

Manufacturing in the Netherlands accounts for about 15% of total Real Gross Value Added, but 57% of the Gross Value Added by the goods producing sectors. Data on new orders, turnover and production in manufacturing are available in [...]

Stability has turned toward an upward move amongst energy prices. The pump price for regular gasoline rose to $2.87 per gallon last week, up six cents w/w and up nearly twenty cents since early-September. Prices rose from the [...]

Reversing the earlier indication of labor market improvement, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated in its Job Openings & Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) that the September job openings rate fell to 2.2% from a downwardly revised [...]

Small businesses optimism improved last month, finally. Following four months in the doldrums, the National Federation of Independent Business indicated that their index of small business optimism jumped to 91.7 last month from 89.0 [...]

Germany rules or drools? This month we saw the bottom suddenly fall out of German orders with especially weak results visited on German export orders. While the German trade picture seems to have held up in September Germany's [...]