Economy in Brief

The National Federation of Independent Business indicated that its Small Business Optimism Index for February increased 0.7% to 107.6.............. Roughly 24 million small businesses exist in the U.S. and they create 80% of all new [...]

Retail gasoline prices slipped to $2.69 per gallon last week (+11.1% y/y) following the prior week's five cent jump. Haver Analytics constructs factors adjusting for the seasonal variation in gasoline pump prices. The seasonally- [...]

French and Italian manufacturing industrial production indexes have backed off in February. For Italy, it is two drops in a row; for France, it is four in a row. The PMI gauges have been weakening in Europe and we can see that the [...]

The headline Final Demand Producer Price Index using new methodology increased 0.3% in March following a 0.2% rise in February. Twelve-month growth rose to 3.0%. A 0.2% March rise had been expected in the Action Economics Forecast [...]

Wholesale trade inventories increased 1.0% m/m (5.5% y/y) in February following an upwardly revised 0.9% m/m gain in January. The February rise was down slightly from the 1.1% m/m increase in the advance report released on March 28 [...]

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) indicated that its Small Business Optimism Index for March fell 2.7% to 104.7 (unchanged from a year ago). The level of optimism hit a 35-year high in February and the March [...]

German exports and imports each fell in February, resulting in the smallest trade surplus since January 2017. However, both 2016 and 2017 produced a low deficit reading in either January or February so the decline has a ring of [...]

The Industrial Materials Price Index from the Foundation for International Business and Economic Research (FIBER) declined 0.9% during the last four weeks. During the last year, however, prices rose 6.1%, and they were up by one-third [...]