Economy in Brief

Another Split decision - The Euro-Area PMIs were split in October as the MFG index rose and the services index fell. While the two indices have been tracking together in this expansion for several months, that tracking has been an [...]

A sidle to the right is the continuing step for initial claims for unemployment insurance. They fell to 452,000 last week from 475,000 during the prior week. That figure, however, was revised up from 462,000. Claims first hit these [...]

Recent trends can be encouraging, but delinquency levels are less heartening. That is the message the American Bankers Association data which indicates that loan delinquencies across all types of credit recently have fallen. That may [...]

Germany's PPI continues to advance and its sequential growth rates all show up trends. The 'silver lining' in this group of clouds is that the three-month growth has settled down below the 6-month growth rate indicating that some of [...]

The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that mortgage applications declined 10.5% last week. The drop gave back most of the prior week's surge which was to the highest level since May 2009. Nevertheless, applications remained up by [...]

The German financial community is more positive about the current situation but more cautious about the outlook. The latest survey of 282 institutional investors and analysts, conducted by ZEW Center for European Economic Research [...]

After having been somewhat soft in recent weeks, the pump price for regular gasoline rebounded to $2.83 per gallon. Nevertheless, prices remained down from $2.91 in early-May. The moderate economic recovery of the last year has been [...]

There's certainly no strength in the housing sector, but the latest several months' data at least show stability. Housing starts last month ticked up 0.3% to 610,000 (AR) from an upwardly revised August level. The latest was the [...]