The latest coincident indicators, and...
...a thank you as the newsletter hits 100+ subscribers!
Update since last Tuesday: Last week, Jonathan Lansner had another excellent industry-level breakdown of the BLS’ establishment report for the IE. Meanwhile, Jeff Collins documented the latest dynamics in the rental market, which continues to overheat due to a variety of governmental and demographic/market-based forces.
Meanwhile, this newsletter now has over 100 subscribers! Thank you so much to everyone who has read and shared articles over the last year. You are part of an important community that is becoming more knowledgeable about a very important metro area economy. Let me know if there is anything specific you’d ever like to see and I’d be happy to look into it for you.
As we continue to debate just what kind of economy we are in right now (recession, slowdown, etc.), I thought that I would check in with some of the most up-to-date information we have on this question.
One piece of information is an Inland Empire Economic Update standard – new claims for unemployment insurance, processed through California’s Employment Development Department. New claims for the week ending Saturday, July 30, in San Bernardino County were at just 2,438. But more important, the four-week average was down to 2,503 compared to the previous 4-week average of 2,535. See the chart below – Riverside County, not pictured, looks very similar. These are promising signs as the national statistics are telling a somewhat different story of slightly increasing rates of new claims over recent weeks.
The other coincident indicator I like to keep an eye on is Google’s “time spent outside home”, published by Opportunity Insights’ Economic Tracker (under “public health” at the top of the link). While this is an imperfect measure of economic activity, it does give us a sense of how much time people are spending on travel to work or school, shopping, or just socializing outside the home. See the chart below.
While there is barely any year-over-year change in this statistic as of the end of July, there has been a decline in this indicator since mid-May, raising some extremely mild concerns about possible economic problems in the future.