Economy in Brief: January 2021

Many commentators have been focusing on some of the negative longer-term effects of the coronavirus crisis on the world economy. These include higher levels of debt, higher long-term unemployment, weaker world trade growth and [...]

• Gasoline prices edge higher to March 2020 peak. • Oil prices increase to last February's high. • Natural gas prices weaken after two weeks of improvement. The price of regular gasoline rose to $2.39 per gallon (-4.5% y/y) in the [...]

While I was still trying to “process”, as the kids say, the events that took place the Wednesday before, on January 13, the Treasury released its December 2020 budgetary data. In the Calendar Year (CY) 2020, the federal government ran [...]

The IFO climate diffusion gauge fell to -0.6 in January after posting a 5.2 reading in December. The chart (tracking the IFO indexes instead of the diffusion gauges reported in the table) shows clear deterioration is afoot again. On [...]

• General business conditions deteriorate to six-month low. • Weakening is broad-based amongst subindexes. • Expectations reading improves. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas reported that its Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey [...]

• Index suggests modest pickup in economic growth. • Production & income strengthen. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's National Activity Index increased to 0.52 during December from November's 0.31, revised from 0.27. Despite the [...]

• Existing home sales rebound 72.9% since May low. • Inventory of unsold homes continues to fall sharply. • Sales are mixed m/m across regions. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported that sales of existing homes rose 0.7% [...]

PMI data now rank observations on their range of values since December 2016. On that basis, the U.S. composite is on its high with the queue standing telling us that U.S. indicators are lower 98% of the time (this high or higher only [...]