New home sales rose sharply again for the second consecutive month. After rising more than 18% in the month of September 2017 over August (subsequently revised down to 14%), sales rose another 6% month-over-month in October. At a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 685k, that’s the highest pace for any month going back exactly ten years to October 2007, a highly [...]
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) estimates sales of existing homes rose 2% in October 2017 from a downwardly revised September estimate. The trade group tries its best to put recent results in the best possible terms, claiming in its press release that at 5.48 million (SAAR) the number of resales is “their strongest pace since June.” That’s technically true [...]
In the technical notes for the Employment Situation Report, the payroll numbers that everyone obsesses over in fine detail, the BLS still shows a 90% confidence interval at 1.6 standard deviations that works out to +/- 115k. That means that whatever number gets splashed onto every headline and worked into every major commentary piece isn’t really the number of payroll [...]
The contradictory nature of the real estate market continues to be exhibited in resales as well as new construction. Though sales of new homes jumped, resales fell. Since last June, the level of contracts for the sale of existing homes has been stuck around 5.4 million SAAR. That was about the same rate of activity as reached at the height [...]
How did the world get this way? I don’t mean the oncoming recession, if that is indeed, as it appears, the economy’s fate. How did the payroll statistics ever attain this kind of deference and even religious zeal? U.S. manufacturing is shrinking, corporate profits are declining and goods are piling up on warehouse shelves. Those trends have elevated concern that [...]
The major headlines will continue to focus on the month-to-month changes in the Establishment Survey though the real analysis is the labor force. Given that the April to June period is often the most heavily influenced by birth-death imputation I would caution over-interpretation of that headline. That is further directed by a conflicting -73k in the Household Survey. This disparity, [...]
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