Economy in Brief: February 2011

The job market continued to show improvement last month. In its latest National Employment Report, the payroll processor, Automatic Data Processing (ADP), indicated that the level of private nonfarm payrolls rose another 187,000 m/m [...]

Australia, barely recovering from the floods of the last two months, is now threatened with a devastating cyclone. The effects of the flooding are only beginning to be reflected in the country's statistics. The consumer price index, [...]

There has been little progress made on reducing unemployment. Since the recession ballooned unemployment rates in the US and in Europe those rates have largely stayed there- higher. Germany has managed to reduce its rate noticeable [...]

Record cold temperatures kept builders off the job during December. The value of construction put-in-place plunged 2.5% following a downwardly revised 0.2% slip in November. The latest figure fell well short of expectations for a 0.1% [...]

Last week, the pump price for regular gasoline retraced the penny increase of the prior week and slipped to $3.10 per gallon. Still, prices remained the firmest since October 2008 and were nearly double the December-2008 low of $1.61. [...]

The Composite Index from the Institute for Supply Management increased last month to 60.8 from a revised 58.5 during December. The figure easily beat consensus expectations for a reading of 58.0. The latest was the highest level since [...]