The key monthly release of the past week was on Personal Income and Outlays for May from the BEA, which gives us several important metrics, including PCE (personal consumption expenditures), which accounts for 70% of US economic activity, and the PCE price index, targeted by the Fed in recent rounds of quantitative easing.

This is an amazing story.  The NSA is collecting, analyzing and monitoring millions of Verizon phone records.

he US National Security Agency is collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans, according to the Guardian newspaper.

The British paper published what it said was a secret court order directing the Verizon company to hand over electronic data on all its customers on an "ongoing daily basis".