J: Three years ago, at the Q&A session after a presentation at the NABE policy conference*, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan (also a former NABE president) was asked for his outlook for the US economy for the next two years. His response was, “same old, same old.” Even though he was speaking during a quarter in which we now know that real GDP fell at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 0.9 percent (remember, all quarterly numbers are seasonally adjusted

The Census Bureau gave us the latest report on retail and food services sales on July 14. The chart shows the data and about all you can say about the first half of 2017 is “pretty flat.” Total retail and food services sales hit a record of $474.5 billion in April, seasonally adjusted (L: always is unless we say otherwise). They fell 0.1 percent in May from that level and another 0.2 percent in June. The June total of $473.5 billion was up 2.8 percent from June 2016. For t

L: Every month Jim fills out economic forecast forms for Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. There are also less-regular forecasting panels that he participates in, such as those for the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), the Philadelphia Fed, and the one that he has been seriously "hot" in lately, the Zillow® Home Price Expectations Survey. (He's won 4 Crystal Balls in the past 4 years for that one--how many crystal balls does a household need?) But I

L: Did you know there is a China Satellite Manufacturing Index (SMI) produced by a company named SpaceKnow that has been live on Bloomberg terminals since last year? We didn't! One of Jim's favorite economists, Carl Weinberg, mentioned it in his July 5 "Weekly Notes on China's Economy" so we looked it up. Carl is a purist and a bit skeptical of new indices, but as he says, "This metric is so different that we are going to cut it a little bit of slack, and at least agree to

J: The economic data flow for July started off with a bang—appropriate for today as we celebrate Brexit 1776—thanks to the good people at the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) in Tempe, AZ. They told us that the June 2017 PMI (Purchasing Managers Index) was 57.8 percent, the highest reading since 57.9 percent in August 2014. This index is a diffusion index, meaning that it measures the difference between positive (or no change) responses and negative ones from thousands