Economy in Brief: January 2016

Consumers reined in their spending for the holiday season. Purchases at retail stores and restaurants eased 0.1% during December (+2.8% y/y) following a 0.4% November rise, revised from 0.2%. For all of last year, sales advanced 2.1%, [...]

Not even the well-publicized problems of Volkswagen could hold back European car buyers at yearend. Europe-wide registrations grew by 4.4% in December, capping a year in which registrations soared by 17.4%. On a three-month smoothed [...]

Import prices declined 1.2% during December (-8.2% y/y) following a 0.5% November easing, revised from -0.4%. A 1.4% decline had been expected in the Action Economics Forecast Survey. Petroleum prices fell 10.0% following a 3.6% [...]

Initial claims for unemployment insurance rose to 284,000 (-4.9% y/y) in the week ended January 9 from an unrevised 277,000 in the previous week. Consensus expectations were for 272,000 applications in the Action Economics Forecast [...]

Reporting later than most EMU nations, Italy released industrial output figures for November showing that IP fell by a sharp 0.7% one month after October's 0.8% gain. Despite the relatively sharp drop, Italian overall IP trends are [...]

The U.S. Treasury Department reported a $14.4 billion budget deficit during December, reversing the $1.9 billion surplus twelve months earlier. A $3.5 billion deficit had been expected in the Action Economics Forecast Survey. Overall [...]

EMU industrial production fell sharply in November, dropping for the third time in four months. Still, the year-over-year growth rate stands above 1% but the sequential path shows that IP growth is steadily decelerating in more recent [...]

The National Federation of Independent Business reported that its Small Business Optimism Index gained 0.4 points during December to a seasonally adjusted 95.2. It remained down, however, from 100.4 in December 2014. According to the [...]