Economy in Brief

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 [...]

In their latest National Employment Report, the payroll processor, Automatic Data Processing (ADP), indicated that the level of private nonfarm payrolls rose 43,000 m/m during October. The September report was revised to show a lesser [...]

The EMU MFG PMIs rose in much of the Zone in October. The weighted EMU reading advanced by nearly one point While the German index rose by 1.6 points, a rise that still failed to shake off the cumulative drops of the previous two [...]

Imbalances in world trade are scheduled to be on the agenda at the upcoming meeting of the G20* in Seoul, Korea on November 11 and 12. The Haver data bases, EMERGE and G10, are good places to find background data pertaining to the [...]

Consumers continue to shy away from the chain-store checkout counter. Last week, chain store sales ticked up all of 0.1% after a 0.3% gain the prior week. These increases, however, left the October average down 0.7%. The decline [...]