Economy in Brief: October 2010

Germany's PPI continues to advance and its sequential growth rates all show up trends. The 'silver lining' in this group of clouds is that the three-month growth has settled down below the 6-month growth rate indicating that some of [...]

The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that mortgage applications declined 10.5% last week. The drop gave back most of the prior week's surge which was to the highest level since May 2009. Nevertheless, applications remained up by [...]

The German financial community is more positive about the current situation but more cautious about the outlook. The latest survey of 282 institutional investors and analysts, conducted by ZEW Center for European Economic Research [...]

After having been somewhat soft in recent weeks, the pump price for regular gasoline rebounded to $2.83 per gallon. Nevertheless, prices remained down from $2.91 in early-May. The moderate economic recovery of the last year has been [...]

There's certainly no strength in the housing sector, but the latest several months' data at least show stability. Housing starts last month ticked up 0.3% to 610,000 (AR) from an upwardly revised August level. The latest was the [...]

Japan's service sector (Tertiary index) dipped in August as we remain unclear if the herky-jerky recovery in services is still in force or not. The services sector is looking like it is in recovery and its Yr/Yr rise is respectably [...]

The small island of Singapore--an area of some 263 square miles and a population of just over 5 million people--has one of the highest per capita GDPs in Asia. In 2009, per capita GDP was $36,537. Foreign trade is the source of much [...]

Is this the beginning of a real turnaround in housing? Time will tell if low interest rates are finally having an effect. But for this month, the National Association of Home Builders reported that their index of housing market [...]