Economy in Brief: 2009

A recent downtrend in initial claims for unemployment insurance continued last week. They fell slightly and remained near their lowest level since early-January. The Labor Department indicated that claims fell to 514,000 from an [...]

Despite recent moderate economic improvement, pricing pressure remained very much under control last month as indicated by weak gains in consumer prices. Perhaps the economy's improvement owes much to that weakened pricing power. [...]

Despite recent moderate economic improvement, pricing pressure remained very much under control last month as indicated by weak gains in consumer prices. Perhaps the economy's improvement owes much to that weakened pricing power. [...]

The DIHK survey, a poling of over 25000 firms by the German chambers of industry and commerce, is not conducted in Q3. So the fourth quarter’s -10 reading compares to the -17 reading from Q2. It is a net balance of opinion diffusion [...]

Why hold inventories if they're loosing value and the demand outlook is uncertain? These two questions are behind the decumulation which continued through August. Business inventories fell another 1.5% which exceeded expectations for [...]

Weakness in the U.S. dollar is pushing up non-oil import prices. Following the strength in oil prices earlier this year, now non-oil prices have firmed. U.S. import prices last month ticked up the expected 0.1% after jumps between [...]

The DIHK survey, a poling of over 25000 firms by the German chambers of industry and commerce, is not conducted in Q3. So the fourth quarter’s -10 reading compares to the -17 reading from Q2. It is a net balance of opinion diffusion [...]

The German financial community lowered slightly its expectations for the economic outlook. The ZEW indicator of economic expectations declined slightly in October to 56.0% from 57.7% in September. This is still well above the long [...]