{"id":195301,"date":"2008-07-17T17:41:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-17T22:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/07\/17\/economics-update-415\/"},"modified":"2008-07-17T17:41:00","modified_gmt":"2008-07-17T22:41:00","slug":"economics-update-415","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/07\/17\/economics-update-415\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Weekly unemployment filings <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/id\/25716768\">are up 16K from last week<\/a>, which is not good, but better than forecast, though, as I&#8217;ve said before, the weekly data is noisy and not very useful.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.philadelphiafed.org\/files\/bos\/bos0708.html\">Philadelphia Fed Business Outlook Survey is definitely downbeat<\/a>, though not as grim as I would have anticipated.<\/p>\n<p>China has problems.  While its growth rate slowed to only 10.1% annually(!), <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/id\/25709779\">inflation remained well above 7%<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Honestly, I think that the fix here is simple, let the Yuan rise some, which would decrease the relative cost of imported energy, and slow exports to cool down the economy, but I do not expect the Chinese central bank to do this.<\/p>\n<p>Housing starts <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/id\/25716754\">jumped 9.1%, <\/a>  only because of change in NY City building codes, allowing for more multi-residential building.  Otherwise it would have been -4%, and <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/07\/17\/news\/economy\/bc.apfn.economy.ap\/index.htm?cnn=yes\">construction of single-family homes dropped by 5.3%<\/a>, hitting a 17 year low.<\/p>\n<p>Seeing as how the Europeans have inflation concerns too, and are talking about ratcheting up rates, it;s not surprising that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/id\/25709699\">the dollar fell today<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Oil continues its slide, <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/07\/17\/markets\/oil\/\">dropping below $130\/bbl for the first time in over a month<\/a>, though <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/07\/17\/news\/economy\/gasoline\/index.htm\">retail gasoline holds at yesterday&#8217;s record<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Weekly unemployment filings are up 16K from last week, which is not good, but better than forecast, though, as I&#8217;ve said before, the weekly data is noisy and not very useful. On the other hand, the Philadelphia Fed Business Outlook Survey is definitely downbeat, though not as grim as I would have anticipated. China has &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1170,1080,973,975,1135,1200,1089],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-currency","category-economy","category-employment","category-energy","category-inflation","category-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195301"}],"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=195301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}