Economy in Brief: March 2012

The job market continues to improve at a moderate rate. Private nonfarm payrolls rose 216,000 last month after rising 173,000 during January, revised from 170,000 reported last month. Earlier figures were revised due to updated [...]

Fourth Quarter data on Gross Domestic Product for many Eastern European countries are beginning to appear. For the most part, these economies peaked in 2008 and after declining in 2009 and 2010 began to recover in the first half of [...]

Purchasing Managers from manufacturing firms in the Euro Area were, on balance. slightly more pessimistic in February than they were in January. For the Euro Area as a whole, the index was 50.33, down from 50.42 in January, still in [...]

Spend money: Consumers tend to do just that. And lately they've been at it wholeheartedly. Chain store sales rose 1.3% last week (1.7% y/y) and the increase lifted early-March spending 1.5% above the February average. The year-to-year [...]

It's been a relentless trudge upward. Pump prices for regular gasoline increased seven cents last week to $3.79 per gallon and were up fifty cents versus early-January. Moreover, retail prices typically decline this time of year with [...]

Orders in the manufacturing sector fell 1.0% (+7.4% y/y) during January and reversed much of a little-revised 1.4% December jump. The decline owed to a 3.7% fall in orders for durable goods. That was little-revised from the advance [...]

Service sector activity continued to improve last month and was at its highest level since last February. The Composite Index for the service and construction sectors from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) rose to 57.3 in [...]

German retail sales ex-autos have fallen for three straight months and have not risen in four months. In nominal terms sales are falling at a 6.4% annual rate but are dropping at a faster 7.1% annual rate in real terms. The [...]