Economy in Brief: 2020

• Gasoline prices increase with seasonal demand. • Crude oil prices continue to improve. • Natural gas prices rise moderately. The price for regular gasoline rose to $2.17 per gallon (-19.9% y/y) in the week ended June 29 from $2.13 [...]

The EMU indexes made sharp rebounds in June but are still weak in their respective historic queues of values. Construction has been the relative strongest sector at its 62.1 percentile and nothing else quite close to that. The next [...]

• Component increases are broad-based. • Expectations also improve broadly. The Dallas Federal Reserve reported in its Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey that the General Business Activity Index increased to -6.1% from the near-record [...]

• Pending home sales rise to three-month high. • Improvement spread throughout the country. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported that pending home sales surged 44.3% during May to the highest level since February. [...]

Stimulus polices in the EMU have finally taken hold among financial variables and both money and credit measures are growing faster- much faster. Will actual economic stimulus result from this? EMU money supply (M2) has progressed [...]

• Spending rebound follows two sharp monthly declines. • Personal income drop reflects lessened government support. • Price inflation is minimal. Personal consumption expenditures increased 8.2% during May (-9.3% y/y) following [...]

In June, U.K. current sales metrics improved across the board. However, expectations for July largely worsened or held to extremely weak readings. These data on trend couple with new information on the virus accelerating its presence [...]

• • • The advance estimate of the U.S. trade deficit in goods grew to $69.67 billion in April..... The advance international trade data can be found in Haver's USECON database. The expectation figure is from the Action Economics [...]