Since the media largely missed what the data from OPEC's February Oil Market Report (covering January OPEC & global oil data) actually showed, and since Saudi jawboning about oil supply and demand in advance of the Aramco IPO has been keyed to keeping oil prices higher, we'll take a quick look at that report, which is available as a free download.
Construction spending fell 1.7% in March, after construction spending for both January and February were revised much higher. The Census Bureau's report on construction spending for March (pdf) estimated that the month's seasonally adjusted construction spending would work out to $1,284.7 billion annually if extrapolated over an entire year, which was 1.7 percent (±0.8%) below the revised annualized February estimate of $1,306.4 billion
The cold week that we saw at the beginning of this month set quite a stunning record for US natural gas supplies, and put an exclamation point on our concerns about the natural gas that we're exporting. In the first week of the new year, the demand for natural gas was so great that we had to use nearly eleven and a half percent of all the natural gas that was in storage in the US, in addition to everything that was produced by US wells during the week, to meet the needs of heating, industry, power generation, and exports.
We’re going to start by reviewing OPEC's December Oil Market Report (covering November OPEC & global oil data), which was released on Wednesday of last week, and which is now available as a free download. The first table from this report that we'll look at is from page 64 of that OPEC pdf, and it shows oil production in thousands of barrels per day for each of the current OPEC members over the recent years, quarters and months, as the column headings indicate.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) claims to be watchdogs over “hate groups and racial extremists throughout the United States.” However, some believe the SPLC is a radical left-wing organization itself, with an extremist agenda of its own.
As I reported here the other day, the White House has endorsed an immigration reform bill by Sens. Cotton and Perdue, known as the RAISE Act. The bill seems to be already drawing both support and fierce opposition. CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta was so upset about the Trump administration’s endorsement of the bill that he picked a fight with Trump’s senior policy adviser Stephen Miller during the latter’s press conference.
The November report on Personal Income and Outlays from theBureau of Economic Analysis includes the month's data for our personal consumption expenditures (PCE), which accounts for more than 69% of the month's GDP, and with it the PCE price index, the inflation gauge the Fed targets, and which is used to adjust that personal spending data for inflation to give us the relative change in the output of goods and services that our spending indicated.
For 66 years the Glass-Steagall act reduced the risks in the banking system. Eight years after the act was repealed, the banking system blew up threatening the international economy. US taxpayers were forced to come up with $750 billion dollars, a sum much larger than the Pentagon’s budget, in order to bail out the banks. This huge sum was insufficient to do the job. The Federal Reserve had to step in and expand its balance sheet by $4 trillion in order to protect the solvency of banks declared “too big to fail.”
The consumer price index increased by 0.4% in November, as higher prices for energy were only slightly offset by lower prices for groceries and clothing. The Consumer Price Index Summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the seasonally adjusted price index rose 0.4% in November after it had risen 0.1% in October, 0.5% in September, 0.4% in August, 0.1% in July, and after it was unchanged in June and had fallen 0.1% in May.
Since the OPEC production cuts are the main factor underpinning oil prices, and hence the ongoing increases in US drilling, we'll start by taking a quick look at OPEC May Oil Market Report (covering April OPEC & global data), which was released on Thursday of last week.
The seasonally adjusted Producer Price Index (PPI) for final demand rose 0.4% in October, as prices for finished wholesale goods increased 0.3%, while margins of final services providers increased by 0.5%. This followed a September report that indicated the overall PPI had increased by 0.4%, as prices for finished wholesale goods increased 0.7%, while margins of final services providers increased by 0.4%
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