LAST WEEK

News & Commentary Weekly Highlights:

• Market Watch: On the U.S. Economy, Is the Glass Half Full, or Half Empty? (Friday)
• Wall Street Journal: ECB Leaves Door Open for Further Interest-Rate Cuts (Thursday)
• Forbes: Why 70% of Companies Paid Zero in Corporate Taxes: They Had Zero Profits (Wednesday)
• Wall Street Journal: The U.S. Occupations at Greatest Risk of a Labor Shortage (Tuesday)
• Real Clear Markets: Treasury’s Costly Mistake on Inversions (Monday)

 

Top Economic Indicator Highlights:

Existing Home Sales (March)

• Seasonally adjusted annual pace: 5.33 million units
• Change from previous month: 5.1%
• Change from last year: 1.5%
• Noteworthy: The median sales price of existing homes sold was up 5.7% from a year ago to $222,700 in March. The share of first-time homebuyers was 30% in March, unchanged from February and from a year ago, and matched the average for all of 2015. All-cash sales were one-fourth of transactions in March, unchanged from February.

 

JEC Releases:

• Happy Tax Day! (Monday)
• JEC Hearing Highlights: Is Our Complex Code Too Taxing on the Economy? (Wednesday)

 

THIS WEEK

Upcoming Economic Reports & Releases:

Major Indicators

• New Home Sales (10am, Monday)
• Durable Goods Orders (8:30am, Tuesday)
• S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index (9am, Tuesday)
• International Trade in Goods (8:30am, Wednesday)
• Gross Domestic Product (8:30am, Thursday)
• Pending Home Sales Index (10am, Thursday)
• Employment Cost Index (8:30am, Friday)
• Personal Income & Outlays (8:30am, Friday)

Reports

• Federal Open Market Committee Meeting Announcement (2pm, Wednesday)

 

Chart of the Week:

 

 

The chart above demonstrates unemployment rates by state as averages from the second quarter of 2015 through the first quarter of 2016. Each state shows two measures of unemployment, the “official” U-3 rate, which includes total unemployed as a share of the labor force, and the oft-termed “real” U-6 rate, which also includes marginally attached workers (who actively looked for work within the past year, but not the past 4 weeks) and those working part-time for economic reasons. The U-6 rate is considered a broader measure of labor market underutilization. As shown above, both North Dakota and South Dakota have relatively low U-3 and U-6 rates, while at the other end of the chart Nevada shows the highest U-6 rate, but not quite the highest U-3 rate.