Economy in Brief: 2011

The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that overall mortgage applications fell 5.5% last week and reversed the prior week's increase. The decline left applications near the lowest level since 2008. Applications to refinance a [...]

The German trade surplus rose this month and has been moving erratically higher. In December exports grew by 0.5% as imports fell by 2.3% enlarging the surplus gap. But that has not been the general story. Over 12-months imports have [...]

Consumers grow tired of not spending. So last week, sales at chain stores rose 2.2% after four consecutive weeks of decline. The increase brought sales 0.8% above the January average which was down 2.3% from December. During the last [...]

Lately, gasoline prices have done little but rise. The pump price for regular gasoline last week rose three cents to $3.13 per gallon, its highest since October 2008. The latest was roughly double the December-2008 low of $1.61. [...]

Not surprisingly German orders and IP show similar characteristics. In the orders report capital goods are strong and consumption orders are weak. For the IP it is the same relative configuration, but with even weaker trends for [...]

Chile, Latvia, and Pakistan reported their inflation rates for January today. The year to year change in the Consumer Price Index--the most common measure of inflation--was 2.73% for Chile, 3.66% for Latvia and 14.19% for Pakistan.The [...]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in its Job Openings & Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) that the December job openings rate slipped to 2.3% from an upwardly revised 2.4% during November. For the full year the job opening rate [...]

Small business confidence is on the mend. The National Federation of Independent Business indicated that their index of small business optimism rose to 94.1 in January from 92.6 in December. The latest was the highest level since [...]