Economy in Brief: April 2018

The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that its total Mortgage Applications Volume Index eased 0.2% last week (-1.9% y/y), following a 4.9% increase during the prior week. Purchase loan applications were unchanged (+11.2% y/y), [...]

The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index fell 1.8% during March (+2.2% y/y) to 127.7 following a 4.6% increase during February to 130.0......... The Consumer Confidence data is available in Haver's CBDB database. The total [...]

Italy can be a difficult country to understand. Its GDP has lagged badly since the great global recession. From Q1 2008 to date, Italian GDP actually has failed to grow and has declined by 5.8%. That’s a period of 10 years without net [...]

Sales of new single-family homes during March increased 4.0% (8.8% y/y) to 694,000 (SAAR) following a 3.6% February gain to 667,000, revised from 618,000. Expectations had been for 620,000 sales in the Action Economics Forecast [...]

The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index rose to 128.7 in April from 127.0 (initially reported as 127.7) in March and was 7.8% higher than a year ago. The Action Economics Forecast Survey had looked for a slight decline in the [...]

The Federal Housing Finance Agency's (FHFA) index of U.S. house prices rose 0.6% during February following January's 0.9% advance, revised from 0.8%. The 7.2% y/y rate of increase was nearly the quickest since 2013, up from 5.2% in [...]

Retail gasoline prices increased to $2.80 per gallon last week (14.3% y/y) following the prior week's six cent increase to $2.75 per gallon. It was the highest price level since July 2015. Haver Analytics constructs factors adjusting [...]

In the EMU, both the services and manufacturing sectors took a substantial step down one month ago. In April, they are holding their ground at a lower level of indicated activity. The moving averages, calculated on lagging historic [...]