Economy in Brief: January 2020

The retail CBI survey has solid signaling power for U.K. retail sales The small table below extracts the percentile standing metrics from the large table below to feature their message. The message is clearly that current retailing [...]

The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index rose a solid 3.4 points (2.7% m/m, 8.1% y/y) to 131.6 (1985=100) in January from an upwardly revised 128.2 in December (initially reported as 126.5). The Action Economics Forecast [...]

• Headline durable goods orders jumped 2.4% in December, failing to make up for the downwardly-revised 3.1% drop in November. • Transportation orders account for the volatility. Excluding transport, orders edged down 0.1%. • Core [...]

• Headline durable goods orders jumped 2.4% in December, failing to make up for the downwardly-revised 3.1% drop in November. • Transportation orders account for the volatility. Excluding transport, orders edged down 0.1%. • Core [...]

Retail gasoline prices fell to $2.51 per gallon (+11.1% y/y) in the week ended January 27 from $2.54 per gallon in the previous week. This was the third consecutive weekly decline and the lowest price since the week ended March 11, [...]

The advance reading for November indicated that durable goods orders fell 2.0% m/m (-3.7% y/y) following a 0.2% m/m rise in October, revised down from 0.6%. A 1.5% increase had been expected in the Action Economics Forecast Survey. [...]

• New single-family home sales tick down to 694,000 in December, meaningfully weaker than the expectations of 727,000. • Downward revisions to October and November leave Q4 unchanged from Q3. Sales of new single-family homes declined [...]

IFO expectations fell to -5.2 in January from -3.1 in December when presented in its diffusion format. The expectations diffusion reading has an 11.6 percentile standing on data back to 1991 and has an ‘equally weak’ 10.2 percentile [...]