Housing Starts dropped -5% in June 2010. Last month housing starts were revised to a -14.9% decline from April.
Privately-owned housing starts in June 2010 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 549,000. This is 5.0 percent below the revised May 2010 estimate of 578,000.
The below St. Louis Fred graph is the monthly percentage change in single units for new housing starts. Single family housing starts dropped -0.7% in June, which is flat in comparison to last month's -17.2% drop.
You're going to love this one. BP offshore outsourced the redesign of the blow-out preventer to China. Yes this is the very blow-out preventer that failed and caused the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.
BP ordered the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, whose explosion led to the worst environmental disaster in US history, to overhaul a crucial piece of the rig's safety equipment in China, the Observer has learnt. The blow-out preventer – the last line of defence against an out-of-control well – subsequently failed to activate and is at the centre of investigations into what caused the disaster.
Experts say that the practice of having such engineering work carried out in China, rather than the US, saves money and is common in the industry.
This weekend BP remained cautiously optimistic that the cap placed on top of the Gulf of Mexico well on Thursday night would continue to hold back the torrent of oil. It is the first time the flow has been stopped since the accident happened almost three months ago. But BP said that the pressure readings from the Macondo well were not as high as it had hoped, which could indicate that it has ruptured and that oil could be leaking out somewhere else.
On The Economic Populist you might have noticed the right column. We try to list other sites and blogs who have exceptional insight and writing on what is happening in the U.S. economy.
Sometimes though, one cannot say it better but miss those who did.
Must Read Post #1
The Big Picture $4 trillion dollar hangover is also Bloomberg's chart of the day. Below is the ratio of mortgage debt to residential asset values.
Must Read Post #2
Paul Krugman asks is there a jobs mystery? He points us to the below chart, which I hope to look at deeper. For now it appears output has become spiked, starting in 2000 (can you say bad trade deals, China PNTR and offshore outsourcing?) in comparison with recessions of the past. The below graph is non-farm, Krugman has business, but the pattern remains. Notice the reduced output aligning with the grayed recession period and notice the output spikes are increasing, starting in 2001 to the unbelievable spike today. Also notice this recession cycle end date is not official. The grayed areas are the current probable end date.
China is now the world's biggest energy consumer, knocking the U.S. off a perch it held for more than a century, according to new data from the International Energy Agency.
The Paris-based agency, whose forecasts are generally regarded as bellwether indicators for the energy industry, said China devoured 2,252 million tons of oil equivalent last year, or about 4% more than the U.S., which burned through 2,170 million tons of oil equivalent. The oil-equivalent metric represents all forms of energy consumed, including crude oil, nuclear, coal, natural gas and renewable sources such as hydropower.
One might think that's great the U.S. is using less energy than China, but it's not. Industrial enterprise and manufacturing are the biggest consumers of energy and this reflects, once again, on how China has captured U.S. manufacturing ...and jobs.
There has been a lot of talk about a double-dip recession recently by people like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini, how to define it, and what it means. What is missing from these discussions is the most obvious question of all: why won't the economy recover?
Capitalism is supposed to be self-correcting - or so we've been told - and a recession like the one we've had is supposed to be that reset button. So why aren't businesses hiring?
I'm going to try to answer that question in the simplest way possible.
There are two primary reasons why the economy isn't recovering, one reason is cyclical, the other is secular.
Today the ECRI Weekly Leading Index was at 9.8%. Notice from the graphs below, (fxmarketalerts.com), this index was -10% around the start of this recession.
The Consumer Price Index for June 2010 declined -0.1% from last month. This is the 3rd month CPI has declined, -0.2% in May and April CPI decreased -0.1%. Core CPI increased +0.2%. This report is from the BLS website.
It's Friday Night! Party Time! Time to relax, put your feet up on the couch, lay back, and watch some detailed videos on economic policy!
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