Economy in Brief: September 2011

Consumer spending has lost forward momentum. Chain store sales fell 0.7% last week and were down 1.5% from the August average. Sales fell 1.8% during August but remained up 2.7% y/y. During the last ten years there has been a 66% [...]

The pump price for regular gasoline rose another four cents last week to $3.67 per gallon. Nevertheless, prices remained down twenty-nine cents since the May peak. Pump prices usually rise this time of year with increased seasonal [...]

German orders fell by 2.8% after two months of rising and were weaker than had been expected in July. Year-over-year orders are up by 8.7% on roughly similar growth for domestic-sourced orders and foreign orders, but after that the [...]

Purchasing Managers in the Service Industry in the Euro Area continue to downgrade their prospects. The Final Estimate for the August diffusion index representing their views was 51.4840, compared with 51.5776 for July. It was also [...]

The August Composite Index for the service and construction sectors from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) rose to 53.3 from an unrevised 52.7 during July. The figure beat Consensus expectations for a further decline to 51.0. [...]

Central bankers like Yr/Yr inflation trends because those trends usually are ‘true’. In the case of the Euro-Area’s PPI, Yr/Yr inflation is still pretty high and the sector paths show very little loss in near term momentum except for [...]

The job market showed no glimmer of improvement last month, held back by a strike, lower factory sector employment and lower earnings. An unchanged reading for nonfarm payrolls followed downward revisions to earlier numbers and [...]

For all the fears about consumer spending, automobiles remain on the shopping list.Unit sales of light vehicles during August slipped just 0.8% from July to 12.12M units (SAAR) following a 5.8% July increase. Sales continued a [...]