Skip to main content

US spending slows.

US spending

 Spending by US households and businesses stalled in November. However, a slight easing in price pressures left inflation at levels unlikely to make the Federal Reserve soon pause its aggressive campaign to raise interest rates. According to commerce department data released yesterday, personal spending rose 0.1 per cent in November from a month earlier. That missed economists’ expectations for a 0.2 per cent rise and was down from an upwardly revised 0.9 per cent jump in October. The slight increase in spending was accompanied by a series of other economic figures yesterday, including a slowdown in the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge in November and a muted growth in a popular proxy for business investment.

An index of consumer sentiment remained near a historical low, but its accompanying survey showed Americans were more optimistic about inflation easing in the year ahead. The personal consumption expenditures price index, which measures how much consumers are paying for goods and services, rose 0.1 per cent in November, the commerce department said, increasing the annual rate to 5.5 per cent. The yearly rate moderated to 4.7 per cent from 5 per cent in October, but that remains well above the 2 per cent level for which the Fed aims. Although those data suggest price pressures are not declining fast enough to make the Fed soon pause its rate-rising cycle, there were some signs that Americans are becoming more optimistic about the inflation outlook.

The S&P 500 was up 0.3 per cent at midday yesterday following the release of the latest economic data.

www.sba.tax

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Cloud Bookkeeping

Google has launched its Bard chat­bot.

  Google has launched its Bard chat­bot in a move to rival OpenAI’s pop­u­lar Chat­GPT, as it seeks to make up lost ground in the race to com­mer­cial­ise gen­er­at­ive arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence tech­no­logy. Google said that Bard, which provides answers to text­based ques­tions, will be run sep­ar­ately from its Google Search engine. In recent weeks, gen­er­at­ive AI has also been integ­rated into widely used pro­ductiv­ity applic­a­tions, such as Google’s Work­space includ­ing Google Docs and Gmail, and Microsoft’s Office 365 soft­ware, as well as into pop­u­lar apps such as Duolingo, allow­ing mil­lions of people to start inter­act­ing with the tech­no­logy. «We want to get feed­back and gradu­ally phase up the num­ber of people who have access to Bard, and the reason for that is we want to be able to test and learn from that before we roll it out very widely,» said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice-pres­id­ent of Google Research. Bard is built on top of Google’s AI tech­no­logy known a...
3 comments
Read more

US producer price index.

 The pro­du­cer price index, which is often regarded as a lead­ing indic­ator of where con­sumer infla­tion is headed in sev­eral months, rose 0.7 per cent last month from Decem­ber, the US Bur­eau of Labor Stat­ist­ics said yes­ter­day, that sur­passed eco­nom­ists’ expect­a­tions for a 0.4 per cent increase. On an annual basis, the PPI, which tracks prices paid to US pro­du­cers for goods and ser­vices, was up 6 per cent from a year ago. That marked a mod­er­a­tion from 6.5 per cent in Decem­ber but came in well above mar­ket fore­casts for 5.4 per cent. Last month, a block­buster non-farm payrolls report showed the US eco­nomy added more than half a mil­lion jobs in Janu­ary, and the job­less rate fell to a 53year-low of 3.4 per cent. Fed chair Jay Pow­ell then warned rates might rise more than investors expect as the firm labour mar­ket could mean it takes longer for the Fed to hit its 2 per cent tar­get. The S&P 500 was down 0.6 per cent in morn­ing trad­ing, hav­ing man­a...
2 comments
Read more

Inflation fell in Germany and Spain.

 Infla­tion fell rap­idly in two of Europe’s largest eco­nom­ies in March after a sharp drop in energy costs des­pite rises in the price of other goods and ser­vices. Ger­man con­sumer prices rose 7.8 per cent year-on-year on a har­mon­ised basis, down from the pre­vi­ous month’s rate of 9.3 per cent but higher than the 7.5 per cent fore­cast by eco­nom­ists polled by Reu­ters. The fig­ures came hours after Spain’s annual infla­tion rate almost halved to 3.1 per cent for March, from 6 per cent the pre­vi­ous month. Euro area gov­ern­ment bonds sold off after the coun­try’s infla­tion fig­ures were pub­lished. Yields on Ger­man two-year debt rose 0.13 per­cent­age points to 2.8 per cent as investors bet that bor­row­ing costs in the euro­zone would rise fur­ther. The ECB has raised interest rates swiftly in response to a surge in infla­tion over the past year, rais­ing its bench­mark deposit rate from minus 0.5 per cent the last sum­mer to 3 per cent. However, some mem­bers of the g...
Post a Comment
Read more