Economy in Brief: 2019

Retail gasoline prices ticked up to $2.61 per gallon last week (-5.4% year-on-year) from $2.60 in the previous week, Gasoline prices have been range-bound since early August. Haver Analytics constructs factors adjusting for the [...]

EMU manufacturing IP is declining in step with weakness in the manufacturing PMI The Markit manufacturing flash indexes are now replaced with their final gauges. Manufacturing in the EMU is slightly less weak than in its flash but it [...]

Factory orders fell 0.6% (-3.5%) in September following an unrevised 0.1% August dip. A 0.5% decline had been expected in the Action Economics Forecast Survey. Orders for durable goods fell 1.2% (-5.5% y/y), revised from the advance [...]

The value of construction put-in-place improved 0.1% (-1.9% y/y) during August........... The construction spending figures, some of which date back to 1946, are in Haver's USECON database. The expectations reading can be found in the [...]

Weakness continues in the factory sector. The ISM manufacturing index fell to 47.8 during September........ The ISM figures are diffusion indexes where a reading above 50 indicates expansion. The figures from the Institute for Supply [...]

The market for new motor vehicles softened last month. The Autodata Corporation reported that sales of light vehicles during October declined 3.8% (-4.9% y/y) to 16.58 million units (SAAR) from 17.23 million during September. It was [...]

Job growth moderated during October, but a strike at GM and a hefty drop in temporary Census workers accounted for much of the slowdown. Nonfarm payrolls increased 128,000 (1.4% y/y) during October following a 180,000 September gain, [...]

Manufacturing PMI values that feature the ISM in the U.S. and use flash values for Europe demonstrate still weak manufacturing conditions globally. The overall average (unweighted for importance) PMI is unchanged in October at 49.3, [...]