Month: August 2026

July retail sales rang in at a dismal -0.6% M-o-M, and, adjusted for inflation, were slightly worse at -0.7%. Moreover, the “control group” retail sales number, which feeds directly into the personal consumption segment of GDP, contracted 0.4%. But don’t…

The Friday File: Brazil is the world’s largest coffee producer with 35% of global production, mostly arabica beans, a variety widely used in premium/specialty coffees. Coffee output is reported in 60kg bags of unroasted coffee. Brazil’s production is 63 million…

To solve rising electricity prices for consumers stemming from the growth of energy-hungry AI data centers, make data centers the first group subject to power cuts during grid stress. This will strongly encourage data centers to bring their own power…

July CPI came in at 0.1% and core CPI 0.2%. This brought the Y-o-Y trend for CPI to 3.4%, from 3.5% last month, and core CPI to 2.5% from 2.6% last month. Better yet, three-month core CPI is at 1.6%…

Recent research finds tariffs announced on 4/2/25 increased prices of goods three ways. They directly raised the price of imported goods by 1.5 percentage points. Tariffs also raised the price of imported inputs and that raised inflation by half a…

While only a few months of data, July lost 23,000 jobs, and May and June were revised down by 103,000 combined. Although unemployment fell to 4.1%, it was only because the labor force participation rate slid to 61.4%, which outside…

The Friday File: The humble anchovy is the primary ingredient in fishmeal, making it essential to production of salmon/seabass/shrimp. The expected El Niño could sharply reduce anchovy catches, creating shortages, perhaps dwarfing the impacts of the 1997 El Niño because…

Caterpillar’s 26Q2 earnings were superb. The AI boom continues to drive demand for its engines and generators, while construction activity boosts demand for dump trucks/bulldozers/excavators. Quarterly revenue hit an all-time high, it raised full-year sales guidance, and its backlog is…

While the Chinese yuan is indeed undervalued, it’s not the key to reversing China’s immense trade surpluses, it’s primarily an outcome. China suppresses household consumption and is experiencing collapsing residential property values. That combination creates weak currency. The US runs…

Weekly first-time claims for unemployment fell 22,000, the biggest decline in three months, to a seasonally adjusted 187,000, the lowest level of new applications since September 1969. While the drop was probably due to some quirks, the consistently low level…