Economy in Brief: February 2019

Retail gasoline prices edged up to $2.39 per gallon last week (-6.2% year-on-year). Haver Analytics constructs factors adjusting for the seasonal variation in gasoline pump prices. The seasonally-adjusted price rose to $2.57 per [...]

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Price Index for house purchases rose 0.3% m/m (5.6% y/y) in December following an unrevised 0.4% m/m (5.8% y/y) increase in November. The slowdown in the y/y rate to 5.6% was a continuation of [...]

The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index jumped a great-than-expected 8.0% to 131.4 in February (1.1% year-on-year) reversing January's decline. Still, confidence has fallen 6.5 points from the cycle high touched in October [...]

In Germany economic expectations have fallen off rather sharply but the German consumer confidence reading continues to hover very close to its all-time high on this gauge. The GFK index is a look-ahead index that is updated through [...]

Total housing starts dropped 11.2% (-10.9% year-on-year) during December to a 1.078 million annual rate (AR), its lowest level in 27 months (this report was delayed as a result of the government shutdown). December starts were [...]

The ifo detail this month comes as the headline indices have more or less paused for a month at low reading levels. As we saw in the advance ifo report business expectations for 6-months ahead stand in their lower 24th percentile, a [...]

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas reported in its Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey that the General Business Activity Index jumped to 13.1 in February from 1.0 in January. The index had fallen to a two-and-a-half year low of -5.1 [...]

We present the diffusion readings to summarize the German ifo index. The table also looks at two separate rankings of the ifo results. One ranks the index (diffusion reading) since 2014, the second ranks the standing over a longer [...]