December 2016 retail sales increased by 0.6% and are up a whopping 4.1% from a year ago. November's retail sales were revised to a 0.2% monthly increase. The reason for December's gain were automobile sales, online sales and gas. Auto sales blew through the roof at a 2.4% monthly increase and gas did also on rising prices. Without autos & parts sales, retail sales would have increased only 0.2% for the month.
The seasonally adjusted Producer Price Index (PPI) for final demand rose 0.3% in December as prices for finished wholesale goods increased 0.7%, while margins of final services providers increased by 0.1%. This followed a November report that indicated the overall PPI had increased 0.4%, with prices for finished goods up 0.2% while final demand for services rose 0.5%, and an October report that indicated the PPI was unchanged, with prices for finished goods up 0.4% while final demand for services fell 0.3%.
The December 2016 unemployment report looks almost static as changes in most of the statistics are small. The unemployment rate ticked up by 0.1% to 4.7%. Those employed increased by 63,000 a very small monthly number. Those unemployed monthly change was also relatively small. Even those dropping out of the labor force barely registered for the month.
"Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and Mixed Martial Arts, which are not the arts,” ~ Meryl Streep
History is nuanced. The connections between what happened historically and the way things are now, are nuanced. Will anyone claim that President-Elect Trump has a nuanced understanding of the ways things are and the history of how they came to be that way?
Tweets are not nuanced. You can express a provocation in 140 characters or fewer, but you can’t express a concept, much less a nuanced concept. That’s why some people are tweeting in chains. But that too is a poor substitute for rational discourse.
Forgetful of the support of working class voters in the election, Mr. Trump will nominate an opponent of the Obama Administration’s new overtime rule, Mr. Andy Pudzer, for Secretary of Labor. The rule more than doubles, to $47,000, the salary threshold at which a worker can be considered overtime exempt based on job duties. It was set to go into effect later this year, subject to a challenge in the federal courts.
The October 2016 S&P Case Shiller home price index shows a seasonally adjusted 5.6% price increase from a year ago for the 20 metropolitan housing markets and a 4.3% yearly price increase in the top 10 housing markets. Last month the annual gain was 5.4%.
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