Economy in Brief: October 2018

Inflation diffusion is high over three months, six months and 12 months. The diffusion values show that inflation diffusion is well above the ‘neutral’ 50% mark on these horizons. Diffusion counts the number of sectors where inflation [...]

Initial claims for unemployment insurance rose to 214,000 (-11.2% y/y) during the week ended October 6 from 207,000 in the prior week, which was unrevised. The Action Economics Forecast Survey had expected a smaller increase to [...]

The headline Final Demand Producer Price Index using new methodology eased 0.1% during August (+2.8% y/y) after holding steady in July. It was the first decline since February 2017. A 0.2% increase had been expected in the Action [...]

As the second and third largest economies in the euro area, sharing a border and a currency, France and Italy see their industrial sectors tending to move more or less together over time. The R-squared relationship between Italian [...]

Wholesale inventories jumped 1.0% during August (5.1% y/y) following an unrevised 0.6% July increase. The August gain compared to 0.8% expected in the Informa Global Markets Survey. The rise compared to the 0.7% increase reported in [...]

The headline Final Demand Producer Price Index using new methodology gained an expected 0.2% during September (2.6% y/y) following a 0.1% August dip. The PPI excluding food & energy also rose an expected 0.2% last month (2.5% y/y) [...]

Gasoline prices increased to $2.90 per gallon last week (15.9% y/y), up three cents from the prior week. Haver Analytics constructs factors to adjust for the marked seasonal variation in prices. The seasonally-adjusted gasoline price [...]

Trade trends and conditions With exports at 47% of GDP, it is no wonder that Germans watch export performance very closely and worry about even small perturbances to export trends. In August, German exports fell by a tiny 0.1%, but [...]