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The Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers (CPI-U) released Monday morning puts the year-over-year inflation rate at 2.29%. It is below the 3.76% average since the end of the Second World War and above its 10-year moving average, now at 1.77%.

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Month-over-month nominal sales in December increased by 0.3% (0.33% to two decimal points). Real Retail Sales, calculated with the seasonally adjusted Consumer Price Index, increased by 0.1% (0.12% to two decimal points).

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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 75 is down 1 from last month.

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The latest Manufacturing Index came in at 17.0, up 14.6 from last month’s 2.4. The 3-month moving average came in at 9.3, up from 5.9 last month. Since this is a diffusion index, negative readings indicate contraction, positive ones indicate expansion. The Six-Month Outlook came in at 38.4, up from the previous month’s 34.8.

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The Census Bureau’s Advance Retail Sales Report for December was released this morning. Headline sales came in at 0.33% month-over-month to one decimal and at below the Investing.com forecast. Core sales (ex Autos) came in at 0.75% MoM (to two decimals).

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This morning’s seasonally adjusted 204K new claims, down 10K from the previous week’s unrevised figure, was better than the Investing.com forecast of 216K.

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Here’s the latest on the three largest cryptocurrencies by market share: bitcoin, Ether, and Ripple.

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The 20th century Baby Boom was one of the most powerful demographic events in the history of the United States. We’ve created a series of charts to show seven age cohorts of the employed population from 1948 to the present.

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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 our monthly workforce analysis to include Friday’s Employment Report for November. The unemployment rate fell to 3.5%, and the number of new nonfarm jobs (a relatively volatile number subject to extensive revisions) came in at 266K.

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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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Today’s release of the December Producer Price Index (PPI) for Final Demand was up 0.1% month-over-month seasonally adjusted, up from no change last month. It is at 1.3% year-over-year, up from 1.1% last month, on a non-seasonally adjusted basis. Core Final Demand (less food and energy) came in at 0.1% MoM, up from -0.2% the previous month and is up 1.1% YoY NSA. Investing.com MoM consensus forecasts were for 0.2% headline and 0.2% core.

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This morning we got the latest Empire State Manufacturing Survey. The diffusion index for General Business Conditions at 4.8 was an increase of 1.3 from the previous month’s 3.5. The Investing.com forecast was for a reading of 3.55.

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Note: This commentary has been updated with the latest numbers from Friday’s Employment Report. Consider: Today nearly one in three of the 65-69 cohort and one in five of the 70-74 cohort are in the labor force.

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The Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) is a simple computation: You take the Civilian Labor Force (people age 16 and over employed or seeking employment) and divide it by the Civilian Noninstitutional Population (those 16 and over not in the military and or committed to an institution).

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At present, multiple jobholders account for just 5.1 percent of civilian employment. The survey captures data for four subcategories of the multi-job workforce, the current relative sizes of which we’ve illustrated in a pie chart.

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We’ve updated this series to include the December release of the Consumer Price Index as the deflator and the December monthly employment update. The latest hypothetical real (inflation-adjusted) annual earnings are at $39,848, down 11.4% from 45-plus years ago.

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the December Consumer Price Index data this morning. The year-over-year non-seasonally adjusted Headline CPI came in at 2.29%, up from 2.05% the previous month. Year-over-year Core CPI (ex Food and Energy) came in at 2.26%, down slightly from the previous month’s 2.32% and above the Fed’s 2% PCE target.

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The headline number for December came in at 102.7, down 2.0 from the previous month. The index is at the 85th percentile in this series.

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Seven indexes on our world watch list posted gains through January 13, 2020. The top performer is Hong Kong’s Hang Seng with a gain of 1.44%. China’s Shanghai is in second with a gain of 0.98% and in third is our own S&P 500 with a gain of 0.93%. Coming in last is France’s CAC 40 with a loss of 0.09%.

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The price of Regular and Premium are down a penny and unchanged, respectively, from last week. According to GasBuddy.com, Hawaii has the highest average price for Regular at $3.59 and Oklahoma has the cheapest at $2.19. The WTIC end of day spot price closed at 58.08, down 8.2% from last week.

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Let’s take a closer look at Friday’s employment report numbers on Full and Part-Time Employment.

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The latest monthly employment report showed a gain of 145K nonfarm payrolls, which consists of a gain of 146K service-providing jobs and a loss of 1K goods-producing jobs.

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What does the ratio of unemployment claims tell us about where we are in the business cycle and our current recession risk? At present, the ratio for Continued Claims has been trending down.

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This commentary has been updated to include this morning’s release of Nonfarm Employment. December’s 145K increase in total nonfarm payrolls had revisions that resulted in 14K fewer jobs than previously reported. Annual revisions going back to 2015 were made. The Investing.com consensus was for 164K new jobs and the unemployment rate to remain at 3.5%.

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This morning’s release of the publicly available data from ECRI puts its Weekly Leading Index (WLI) at 148.7, up 0.6 from the previous week. Year-over-year the four-week moving average of the indicator is now at 3.58%, up from last week. The WLI Growth indicator is now at 3.29, up from the previous week.

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This morning’s employment report for December showed a 145K increase in total nonfarm payrolls, which was below the Investing.com forecast of 164K.

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This morning’s seasonally adjusted 214K new claims, down 9K from the previous week’s revised figure, was better than the Investing.com forecast of 220K.

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In this morning’s ADP employment report we got the December estimate of 202K new nonfarm private employment jobs from ADP, an increase over November’s revised 124K. The popular spin on this indicator is as a preview to the monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Here’s the latest on the three largest cryptocurrencies by market share: bitcoin, Ether, and Ripple.