I haven't done one of these in a while, so I'll quickly summarize the most notable economic data releases for the G7 from the last week:
CANADA
not a lot of Canadian data recently
- on Monday, building permits were down nearly 16% MoM in February, and January's stats were revised down to -6% from -4.6%
- Ivey PMI came in down 2 points to 43.2 in March from 45.2 in February, vs. expectations of a rebound to 47.0, with indications of further inventory building
- housing starts surprised to the upside by increasing in March to 154.7k from 136.1, the first increase in 7 months; the increase was driven by multiple units in Ontario and Quebec (single-family housing starts were basically unchanged; all other provinces saw declines)
- jobs data will be released at 7 a.m. tomorrow
U.S.
- pending home sales increased 2.1% in February, off of a 7.7% fall in January
- initial jobless claims hit a new cycle high of 669k while continuing claims surged to a new record high of 5728k
- factory orders rose more than expected, up 1.8% in February, but the previous month's result was revised down to -3.5% from -1.9%
- nonfarm payrolls came in almost right on expectations, at -663k; there was no revision to February, but January was revised significantly to -741k, the biggest one-month fall since 1949
- the unemployment rate jumped up to 8.5% from 8.1%, while the broadest measure of unemployment, the U-6 rate, climbed to 15.6%
- average hourly earnings held steady for those employed, up 3.4% YoY, but, problem is, not only are so many fewer people employed, those who are still working are working less; average weekly hours continued to fall, now down to record low 33.2
- ISM Non-Manufacturing index fell unexpectedly to 40.8 from 41.6
- consumer credit data for February proved very volatile; a fall of $3 billion was expected but the decline came in at -$7.5B instead; this, however, was off of a significantly revised increase in January, which was initially recorded as an increase of $1.8B but was revised to $8.1B; so, for the two months, credit retrenchment was a bit less than expected
- the Fed released the minutes of its March 17-18 meeting, at which time it announced the initiation of its quantitative easing program; not terribly surprisingly, given how slow the FOMC's members have been all along to appreciate the downside risks, the minutes revealed that "nearly all meeting participants said that conditions had deteriorated relative to their expectation at the time of the January meeting"; Fed staff now think real GDP will flatten out gradually over 2009H2 and then expand slowly in 2010 which backs away from expectations for a 2009H2 recovery
INTERNATIONAL
- UK Nationwide housing prices down 15.7% YoY, not as bad as feared
- French producer prices down 4.5% YoY, worse than feared
- the ECB continued its policy of staying behind the curve, as it cut rates to 1.25% instead of the 1.00% that the market had anticipated
- the German import price index declined in February, now -6.4% YoY
- Italian, German and French PMIs for services weren't quite as weak as expected, rebounding a bit in March to 39.1, 42.3 and 43.6, respectively, though all still well below 50, while the Eurozone Services PMI came in at 40.9 and UK's at 45.5
- Japanese leading and coincident indices stayed pretty steady at 75.2 and 86.8, respectively, the former the lowest its been since 1983
- the Bank of Japan left its rate unchanged at 0.10%
- Eurozone retail sales have fallen 4.0% over the last year, worse than anticipated
- UK industrial production is down 12.5% YoY, while manufacturing production is down 13.8% in that time
- Eurozone Q4 GDP was marked a bit lower, down 1.5% YoY vs the previous estimate of -1.3%
- in China, the state agency said that its Manufacturing PMI rebounded back above 50 to 52.4 in March; but, meanwhile, an independent assesment showed that manufacturing had shrunk for an 8th straight month, as the CLSA PMI shrank to 44.8 from 45.1
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