Next month, in the durable goods series, the Census Bureau will release the results of its annual benchmark changes. In May 2019, the agency will revise the seasonal adjustments going back to January 2002. Unadjusted data will not be, well, further adjusted. None of this, apparently, will include any information gleaned from the comprehensive 2017 Economic Census. I haven’t closely [...]
Ever since the widespread adoption of the rules, so to speak, of Positive Economics the discipline has been trading intuitive sense for mathematics. The equations of econometrics are, for Economists, more “real” than reality. To get to those statistical regressions it requires a whole lot of subjectivity. It doesn’t seem that way at first, or that it could be this [...]
According to Germany’s Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung, or ZEW, the slump in the country’s economy has now reached its fourteenth month. The institute’s sentiment index has improved in the last two, but only slightly. As of the latest calculation released today, it stands at -3.6. That’s up from -24.7 back in October, though sentiment had likewise improved at one point [...]
In February 2015, IHS Markit thought that the US manufacturing sector might be slowing quite against every expectation. Its final PMI reading for the month of January was 53.9, down quite a bit from highs registered in the middle of 2014. Some of those fears seemed put to rest the following month when the flash reading for February 2015 rebounded [...]
The US economic data begins to trickle in slowly. Today, the reopened Census Bureau reports on orders and shipments to and from US factories dating back to last November. New orders for durable goods rose just 4.5% year-over-year in that month, while shipments gained 4.7%. The 6-month average for new orders was in November pulled down to just 6.6%, the [...]
I, for one, am sick of still writing about 2017’s tropical season. It’s been well more than a year and yet we are just now finally moving past them. It would’ve been healthier and more honest had there been more appreciation for what they really were going to do for/to the US economy. Without any more artificial interventions left, the [...]
The manufacturing renaissance at the base of this supposed US economic is disappearing. It is unsurprising, quite predictable actually. First, there was the cleanup from last year’s major storms and then frontrunning potential trade restrictions. Manufacturers domestically were gearing up for a whole host of non-economic reasons. If Keynes had ever been right about activity for the sake of activity, [...]
Heavy manufacturing in the United States has taken on some unusually lumpy characteristics. Over the past year, it has advanced, to be sure, but in very noticeable fits and starts. It therefore raises the same question as the economy has been dealing with since 2007. We’ve seen growth periods like this before, low ceilings and all. This one so far [...]
We are closing in on a record for economic expansion. It’s been talked about more frequently, especially since one has already been reached in the labor market. According to the BLS, there hasn’t been a negative employment report since September 2010 (there was one in September last year, but it has since been revised to slightly positive). That’s 93 consecutive [...]
I missed durable goods last month for scheduling reasons, which was a shame given that May is the month each year for benchmark revisions to the series. Since new estimates under the latest revisions were released today, it seems an appropriate time to revisit the topic of data bias, and why that matters. What happens with durable goods (or any [...]
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