Seeing as the Rec list and recent diary list is full of nothing but Senate-MA election and Haiti recovery diaries, I thought I would recap the week in the economy and provide a pseudo open thread for economic discussions. If you want to discuss the current (or future) state of the economy, please rec this.
The International Trade Report was released on Tuesday, which showed a growing trade deficit mostly the result of petroleum imports, as exports also increased by .9% (not great but still improvement (remember, these are November's numbers).
Wednesday say the release of the Fed's Beige Book, which showed that
while economic activity remains at a low level, conditions have improved modestly further, and those improvements are broader geographically than in the last report.
The report essentially confirms what most of us are seeing, that we have recovered from the lows in 2009, but that the recovery is shallow at best and we have a very long (both in terms of time and scale) way to go before we can say we have recovered.
Thursday followed with an anemic Retail Sales report from the census that showed November 2009 revised up substantially, but December 2009 down .3% from November (but 5.4% above December 2008). This report is subject to huge revisions, as the seasonal adjustments this time of year are enormous (in unadjusted terms for instance December was 17.8% above November). Regardless, the report is at best tepid.
Also on Thursday, the Initial Jobless Claims report was released, showing the important 4-wekk moving average falling 9,000 to 440,000. Continuing claims improved, but that may be attributable to people still falling off of the benefit eligibility. New Deal Democrat has a good summary/analysis of the jobless claims and retail sales data here.
Finally on Thursday, we had a very closely watched $13 billion 30-year Treasury auction go off. According to Bloomberg:
Results for the 30-year bond auction are strong. Coverage of 2.68 compares with a long-term average of 2.31 and 2.45 in last month's auction. The stop-out rate of 4.640 percent is more than 4 basis points below the 1:00 ET bid. Demand for Treasuries rose in immediate reaction to the results.
This should quell any notion that demand for our long-term debt is currently diminishing (for now).
Today we had the Consumer Price Index release that showed December inflation up .1% and year over year inflation up 2.8% (coming off the energy lows seen last December). In other words, there is very little inflation right now and the Fed will use reports like these to keep rates low.
Finally today we had the Industrial Production report released showing that production was essentially flat from November, with all of the reported .6% gain being from energy production (ie utilities) for the surprisingly cold December we had.
If you want to discuss these or anything else economy related, this is your thread. Please rec.