Economy in Brief: October 2010

Global liquidity is going nowhere. In EMU the nominal growth rates for money supply growth have moved up ever so slightly over the past 12-months. The same cannot be said of real money growth. Inflation adjusted credit growth has not [...]

Be not misled by the headline figure. The underlying trend of durable orders has weakened substantially. The Commerce Department reported that September orders surged 3.3% following a 1.0% August decline that was slightly less than [...]

A number of reports on consumer and business confidence were released today--four pertaining to the consumer for France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland and one pertaining to business for the Netherlands. In Switzerland, the latest [...]

The Conference Board reported that consumer confidence improved slightly this month but remained near the lowest level since February. The index of overall confidence rose 3.3% to 50.2 from a little-changed 48.6 in September. [...]

Home price gains lost forward momentum this summer. During August, the seasonally adjusted Case-Shiller 20-City Home Price Index fell 0.3%. It was the second month of decline and pulled the y/y gain down to 1.7% from 4.7% this past [...]

Euro-Area orders jumped by over 5% in August after a drop of 1.8% in July, restoring some sense of balance to the outlook for the Euro-Area itself. In July three of the four largest Euro-Area economies had seen orders drop by about 2% [...]

With the up coming summit meeting of the Group of 20 leading economies on November 11th and 12th in Seoul, Korea exchange rates will be high on the agenda. The finance ministers and central bankers of the 20 met in Gyeongju, Korea [...]

In another sign of weakness in the U.S. economy, the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) fell further last month to its lowest level since February. Moreover, it was near its lowest level of the economic recovery. The decline [...]