Seasonal adjustment difficulties due to calendar issues likely understated August payroll growth. Conversely the improvement in U3 was due mostly to seasonally-adjusted participation rate of students, largely affected by when school restarted in August. Read More
Posts By: xps
July CPI up 0.1%. Annual inflation at 2.0%
Housing prices rise again as does Food, but Airline Fares drop. Read More
Trade Deficit reduces by $3.1bn (7%) in June.
Most of the improvement came from Auto Vehicles and Consumer goods, the latter seeing both an increase in exports and a decrease in imports Read More
Payroll Employment – Trend Forecasts
Here are the mathematical trend numbers which are produced in advance by the ExpliStats modeling of the BLS seasonal adjustment process. The trends here are what could be expected for August, given the seasonally-adjusted BLS trends established through July. Read More
Construction Spending down 2%. Highways biggest contributor.
Spending on Single-Family homes has now dropped below its January 2014 level, while Multi-Family spending continues its steady increase. Read More
Unemployment up slightly, 6.2%. College students looking for work?
The BLS U3 unemployment rate edged up in July (as reported today) from a rounded 6.1% to 6.2%. The good news is that this is due to an increase in the Labor Force Participation Rate. Read More
July Payrolls up 209k (10% below trend)
This morning’s BLS Payrolls Report estimated 209,000 more jobs in July (on a seasonally adjusted basis). This is 10% below our Trend extrapolation of 232,000 and the the consensus forecast of 233,000. Read More