Economy in Brief: 2015

The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index in October unexpectedly reversed improvement during the prior two months. The overall index declined 4.9% to 97.6 but remained up 3.7% y/y. The consensus expectation was for a level of [...]

While we are looking at growth and inflation developments in the EMU, we should also be looking at the financial raw material of growth: money and credit in the EMU. Here we see both series are slowing after about one year of [...]

New orders for durable goods fell 1.2% during September (-3.0% y/y) following a 3.0% August drop, revised from -2.0%. Expectations had been for a 1.0% decline in the Action Economics Forecast Survey. During the last ten years, there [...]

Recent housing market data are throwing off mixed signals. On the heels of Thursday's report that existing home sales in September neared a nine-year high, today's indication that new single-family home sales fell 11.5% last month to [...]

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas indicated that production in the Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey strengthened this month to the firmest point since December. It was up meaningfully following modest firming in September. Moving [...]

Recent housing market data are throwing off mixed signals. On the heels of Thursday's report that existing home sales in September neared a nine-year high, today's indication that new single-family home sales fell 11.5% last month to [...]

The Ifo index fell to 9.3 in October from 10.1 in September. The all-sector drop is less that the drop of the ZEW index reported earlier. The expectations portion of the Ifo index actually saw improvement in October and it is hard to [...]

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City reported that regional manufacturing sector business activity remained roughly stable during October. That was improved as the Composite index of 10th District factory sector activity of -1 [...]