The news that income and spending in the U.S. economy has been resilient must be cheered as good (see news release here). It may result in our seeing a W-shaped recession as opposed to a U- or L-shaped one. The U.S. consumer is much more resilient than I could possibly have imagined.
Whether this ultimately [...]

At 8:30 EDT this morning, the Labor department released its jobless claims numbers. The numbers are not appreciably different than a week ago. But they are largely consistent with recession: 384,000 jobless claims and 3,139,000 continuing claims.
Year-on-year changes:

4-week Average jobless claims: +62,250 (at 378,250 claims)
4-week Average continuing claims: +592,500 (at 3,103,250 claims)

Below are the [...]

Today’s economic data releases were for durable goods and new home sales
Durable Goods
Strong export growth has been keeping U.S. factories busier than they would normally be during a period of falling domestic demand. Orders had fallen for two straight months and are essentially unchanged since January. In April, durable-goods orders fell a revised 1%.Orders for [...]

Ross Perot is making a comeback! The Texas billionaire has come back into the political fray with his website Perot Charts. I recommend taking a stroll through it. You will definitely be a wiser person for it. Today’s chart comes from his site and shows projected social security and medicare spending [...]

Date
Time (ET)
Statistic
For
Actual
Briefing Forecast
Market Expects
Prior
Revised From

Jun 24
10:00 AM
Consumer Confidence
Jun
-
57.0
57.0
57.2
-

Jun 25
8:30 AM
Durable Orders
May
-
0.3%
0.0%
-0.5%
-

Jun 25
10:00 AM
New Home Sales
May
-
520K
510K
526K
-

Jun 25
10:30 AM
Crude Inventories
06/21
-
NA
NA
-1242K
-

Jun 25
2:15 PM
FOMC Policy Statement
-
-
-
-
-
-

Jun 26
8:30 AM
Chain Deflator-Final
Q1
-
2.6%
2.6%
2.6%
-

Jun 26
8:30 AM
GDP-Final
Q1
-
1.0%
1.0%
0.9%
-

Jun 26
8:30 AM
Initial Claims
06/21
-
NA
NA
381K
-

Jun 26
10:00 AM
Existing Home Sales
May
-
5.05M
4.96M
4.89M
-

Jun 27
8:30 AM
Personal Income
May
-
0.4%
0.4%
0.2%
-

Jun 27
8:30 AM
Personal Spending
May
-
0.7%
0.7%
0.2%
-

Jun 27
8:30 AM
PCE Core Inflation
May
-
0.2%
0.2%
0.1%
-

Source Yahoo! Finance

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I was inputting some statistics into an excel spreadsheet for unemployment claims when it occurred to me: the Bush administration is cooking the books. Not literally, but figuratively. Here’s my logic.
Let’s leave aside whether the unemployment numbers reflect reality or not. But, the fact of the matter is that unemployment claims have been going up [...]

Industrial production and capacity utilization numbers were released by the Fed this morning. These numbers are important because production is one of five factors the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) looks at to judge recessions. The numbers were not good.

Production was down y-o-y for the first time since May 2002 besides a [...]

Argentina too has a government statistics problem. Their new inflation index is seen as unbelievable.(see FT article here.)

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The U.S. Department of Labor just released the weekly report for unemployment insurance claims. Initial claims were 384,000, while continuing claims rose to 3.139 million. The 4-week average moved up to 3,099,250. This is 593,000 more than one year ago. Below is the chart for the last two years of continuing [...]

The U.S. economy is losing jobs fast. I will have more to say about this later, but I wanted to get out a link to Bloomberg’s coverage of the 8:30 unemployment report. There’s also a link to the report under the “Economic Data” section in my sidebar. Here’s what Bloomberg said:
“The U.S. [...]