{"id":191875,"date":"2009-06-11T17:22:00","date_gmt":"2009-06-11T22:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/06\/11\/economics-update-201\/"},"modified":"2009-06-11T17:22:00","modified_gmt":"2009-06-11T22:22:00","slug":"economics-update-201","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/06\/11\/economics-update-201\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We had the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/id\/31237208\">latest jobless report come out<\/a>, and it&#8217;s another mixed bag, with the initial claims falling by 24K to 601,000, and the 4 week moving average fell to 621,750, but continuing claims rose again to another record, 6.82 million.<\/p>\n<p>We also have mixed news on retail sales, with a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.calculatedriskblog.com\/2009\/06\/retail-sales-in-may-off-108-from-may.html\">\u00bd% increase month over month, but a 10.8% decrease year over year<\/a>, and a lot of the increase was driven by more expensive retail gasoline, which, by the way, was <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/06\/11\/news\/economy\/gas\/index.htm\">up again today<\/a>, to $2.632\/gal.<\/p>\n<p>And real estate is not looking good, with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/\/id\/31224087\">foreclosures hitting the 3<sup>rd<\/sup> highest on record<\/a>, and<br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/06\/11\/real_estate\/mortgage_rates\/index.htm?postversion=2009061115\">mortgage rates rising sharply<\/a>, to nearly 6%.<\/p>\n<p>Additionally we have, despite the recent stock rally, <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/06\/11\/news\/economy\/Americans_wealth_drops\/index.htm?postversion=2009061113\">Americans&#8217; wealth falling $1.3<\/a> so far in 2009.<\/p>\n<p>Additionally, international trade is still in the doldrums, with <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB124468953324405157.html#mod=rss_whats_news_us\">China&#8217;s exports in may down 26.4% year over year<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>On the brighter side, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601110&amp;sid=aTxJD2uhydvg\">Treasury yields fell<\/a>, indicating that the upward pressure on interest rates may be abating.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, it looks like oil will continue heading up, a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/businessNews\/idUSTRE54R7NA20090611?feedType=RSS&amp;feedName=businessNews\">prices closing at $72.68\/bbl<\/a>, though it was above $73 earlier in the day, largely on the <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/06\/11\/markets\/oil\/\">IEA&#8217;s upwardly revised estimates of world demand<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In currency, the <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/06\/11\/markets\/dollar.reut\/index.htm\">dollar fells on what were seen to be positive jobs and sales data<\/a>, which reduced safe-haven demand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We had the latest jobless report come out, and it&#8217;s another mixed bag, with the initial claims falling by 24K to 601,000, and the 4 week moving average fell to 621,750, but continuing claims rose again to another record, 6.82 million. We also have mixed news on retail sales, with a \u00bd% increase month over &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1080,973,975,1135,1004,1016,1088,1089],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currency","category-economy","category-employment","category-energy","category-finance","category-international-commerce","category-real-estate","category-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191875"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}