Economy in Brief

Sales of new single-family homes during March increased 4.0% (8.8% y/y) to 694,000 (SAAR) following a 3.6% February gain to 667,000, revised from 618,000. Expectations had been for 620,000 sales in the Action Economics Forecast [...]

The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index rose to 128.7 in April from 127.0 (initially reported as 127.7) in March and was 7.8% higher than a year ago. The Action Economics Forecast Survey had looked for a slight decline in the [...]

The Federal Housing Finance Agency's (FHFA) index of U.S. house prices rose 0.6% during February following January's 0.9% advance, revised from 0.8%. The 7.2% y/y rate of increase was nearly the quickest since 2013, up from 5.2% in [...]

Retail gasoline prices increased to $2.80 per gallon last week (14.3% y/y) following the prior week's six cent increase to $2.75 per gallon. It was the highest price level since July 2015. Haver Analytics constructs factors adjusting [...]

In the EMU, both the services and manufacturing sectors took a substantial step down one month ago. In April, they are holding their ground at a lower level of indicated activity. The moving averages, calculated on lagging historic [...]

The National Association of Realtors reported that sales of existing homes increased 1.1% during March (-1.2% y/y) to 5.600 million units (AR) following an unrevised 3.0% February gain to 5.540 million units. Expectations had been for [...]

The German year-on-year PPI has generally been decelerating since early 2017. Technically, the year-on-year PPI has decelerated for six months straight with this month’s acceleration being the first in the period. This is despite the [...]

The Industrial Materials Price Index from the Foundation for International Business and Economic Research (FIBER) increased 0.4% during the last four weeks. The improvement was powered by just two sectors, metals & petroleum. During [...]