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The price of Regular and Premium are down two and one cent, respectively, from last week. According to GasBuddy.com, California has the highest average price for Regular at $3.15 and Oklahoma has the cheapest at $1.79. The WTIC end of day spot price closed at 38.56, down 2.2% from last week.

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Fifth District manufacturing activity strengthened in October, according to the most recent survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. The composite index rose to 29 in October from 21 in September.

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The headline number of 100.9 was a decrease from the final reading of 101.3 for August. Today’s number was above the Investing.com consensus of 102.0.

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The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Housing Market Index (HMI) is a gauge of builder opinion on the relative level of current and future single-family home sales. It is a diffusion index, which means that a reading above 50 indicates a favorable outlook on home sales; below 50 indicates a negative outlook. The latest reading of 85 is up 2 from last month’s 83 and at its highest level in the indicator’s history, exceeding its December 1998 record.

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With today’s release of the August S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, we learned that seasonally adjusted home prices for the benchmark 20-city index saw a 0.46% increase month over month which is cut to 0.34% with inflation adjustment.

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The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has released its U.S. House Price Index (HPI) for August. U.S. house prices were up 2.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted nominal basis from the previous month. Year-over-year the index is up 7.9% on a non-seasonally adjusted nominal basis. After adjusting for inflation and seasonality, the index is up 1.84% in August and up 7.7% year-over-year (seasonally adjusted).

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The latest new orders number at 1.9% month-over-month (MoM) was better than the Investing.com 0.5% estimate. The series is down 1.9% year-over-year (YoY). If we exclude transportation, "core" durable goods was up 0.8% MoM, which was better than the Investing.com consensus of 0.4%. The core measure is up 1.7% YoY.

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The Chicago Fed’s National Activity Index, which we reported on this morning, is based on 85 economic indicators drawn from four broad categories of data:
Production and Income
Employment, Unemployment, and Hours
Personal Consumption and Housing
Sales, Orders, and Inventories

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"Travel on all roads and streets changed by -12.3% (-35.3 billion vehicle miles) for August 2020 as compared with August 2019. Travel for the month is estimated to be 251.3 billion vehicle miles." The 12-month moving average was down 1.1% month-over-month and down 8.8% year-over-year. If we factor in population growth, the 12-month MA of the civilian population-adjusted data (age 16-and-over) was down 1.19% month-over-month and down 9.9% year-over-year.

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This morning the Dallas Fed released its Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey (TMOS) for October. The latest general business activity index came in at 19.8, up 6.2 from 13.6 in September. All figures are seasonally adjusted.

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This morning’s release of the September New Home Sales from the Census Bureau came in at 959K, down 3.5% month-over-month from a revised 994K in August. The Investing.com forecast was for 1.025M.

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Led by some further moderation in the growth of production- and employment-related indicators, the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) declined to +0.27 in September from +1.11 in August. Three of the four broad categories of indicators used to construct the index made positive contributions in September, but three of the four categories decreased from August. The index’s three-month moving average, CFNAI-MA3, moved down to +1.33 in September from +3.22 in August.

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Thursday morning’s seasonally adjusted 787K new claims, down 55K from the previous week’s revised figure, was better than the Investing.com forecast of 8260K.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]We will resume publishing economic and market analysis on 10/26.

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The S&P 500 ended the week up just 19 basis points from last Friday and is up 7.83% YTD. The index is 2.7% below its record close.

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Month-over-month nominal sales in September increased by 1.91%. Real Retail Sales, calculated with the seasonally adjusted Consumer Price Index, increased by 1.70%.

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This morning’s release of the publicly available data from ECRI puts the WLI at 139.0 up 0.2 from the previous week. The WLIg is at 3.6, up from last week and the WLI YoY is at -4.31, also up from last week.

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The October Preliminary came in at 81.2, up 0.8 from the September Final. Investing.com had forecast 80.5.

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Today’s report on Industrial Production for September shows a 0.63% decrease month-over-month, which was below the Investing.com consensus of -0.5%. The year-over-year change is -7.28%, up from last month’s YoY decrease.

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The Census Bureau’s Advance Retail Sales Report for September was released this morning. Headline sales came in at 1.9% month-over-month to one decimal and was above the Investing.com forecast of 0.7%. Core sales (ex Autos) came in at 1.5% MoM.

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This morning’s seasonally adjusted 898K new claims, up 53K from the previous week’s revised figure, was worse than the Investing.com forecast of 825K.

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The latest Manufacturing Index came in at 15, down 2.2 from last month’s 17.2. The 3-month moving average came in at 18.8, down from 21.0 last month. Since this is a diffusion index, negative readings indicate contraction, positive ones indicate expansion. The Six-Month Outlook came in at 56.6, up 17.8 from the previous month’s 38.8.

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This morning we got the latest Empire State Manufacturing Survey. The diffusion index for General Business Conditions at 10.5 was a decrease of 6.5 from the previous month’s 17.0. The Investing.com forecast was for a reading of 15.0.

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Yesterday’s release of the September Producer Price Index (PPI) for Final Demand was at 0.4% month-over-month seasonally adjusted, up from a 0.3% increase last month. It is at 0.4% year-over-year, up from -0.2% last month, on a non-seasonally adjusted basis. Core Final Demand (less food and energy) came in at 0.4% MoM, unchanged from the previous month and is up 1.2% YoY NSA. Investing.com MoM consensus forecasts were for 0.2% headline and 0.2% core.

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Let’s do some analysis of the Consumer Price Index, the best-known measure of inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) divides all expenditures into eight categories and assigns a relative size to each. The pie chart illustrates the components of the Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers, the CPI-U.

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The Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers (CPI-U) released yesterday morning puts the year-over-year inflation rate at 0.99%. It is below the 3.76% average since the end of the Second World War and below its 10-year moving average, now at 1.73%.

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The price of Regular and Premium are unchanged from last week. According to GasBuddy.com, California has the highest average price for Regular at $3.19 and Mississippi has the cheapest at $1.83. The WTIC end of day spot price closed at 39.43, up 0.5% from last week.

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The latest full set UIG for September is 1.27% while the prices-only measure is 2.16%. Current Headline CPI is now 1.37% and Core CPI is 1.71%.

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Here is a table showing the annualized change in Headline and Core CPI, not seasonally adjusted, for each of the past six months. Also included are the eight components of Headline CPI and a separate entry for Energy, which is a collection of sub-indexes in Housing and Transportation. We can make some inferences about how inflation is impacting our personal expenses depending on our relative exposure to the individual components.

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We’ve updated this series to include the September release of the Consumer Price Index as the deflator and the monthly employment update. The latest hypothetical real (inflation-adjusted) annual earnings are at $42,267, down 6.7% from 45-plus years ago.