Doug Short's Blog

The Census Bureau's Advance Retail Sales Report for July released this morning was rather disappointing. Headline sales came in flat month-over-month to one decimal, which conceals a tiny 0.4% decline at two decimal places.

This morning's employment report for July showed a 255K increase in total nonfarm payrolls along with an 18K upward revision for June and a 13K upward revision for May. The Investing.com consensus was for 180K.

The Advance Estimate for Q2 GDP, to one decimal, came in at 1.2 percent, up from 0.8 percent for the Q1 Third Estimate (a downward revision from 1.1 percent). Today's number was far below most mainstream estimates...

Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close as...

Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close as they get to identifying their method.

The New York Stock Exchange publishes end-of-month data for margin debt on the NYX data website, where we can also find historical data back to 1959. Let's examine the numbers and study the relationship between margin debt and...

Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close as they get to identifying their method.

Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close as they...

Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as...

In this morning's ADP employment report we got the May estimate of 173K new nonfarm private employment jobs, an increase from April's 166K, which was an upward revision from 156K. Also, the March number was...