Image Source: Pixabay
 

First, a scheduling note. Several data releases have been made this morning, and several more delayed releases having to do with housing *might* be released tomorrow. Alas, the very late Q3 GDP report is not going to be released at all until the end of December. There will be no releases on Thanksgiving Day and none of note on Friday.

Today I will take a look at the PPI and retail sales reports. I’ll save reporting on the Case Shiller and FHFA house price indexes until tomorrow, integrating that with any construction or new home sales reports, which might also be issued. I’ll also update jobless claims.

Because of the sportiness and continued delays in the federal data, the regional Fed manufacturing and services indexes continue to be of greater importance. The last of these have also been reported yesterday and today, so I will take a comprehensive updated look at those on Friday.

Now … here is a quick look at the producer price index for September. In this case, I can add little to the graphs that were supplied by the Census Bureau, below:
 

There is a distinct upward trend in goods prices (thank you, tariffs!), with a countervailing deceleration in service price inflation for producers. The latter is interesting because it suggests a cooling of the forces driving the services economy, which, after all, is the largest part of the consumer economy.

Further upstream, commodity prices increased only 0.1% in September, after being unchanged in August (blue, right scale). On a YoY basis, commodity prices are only up 1.7%, a deceleration from the 1.9% back in July (red, left scale) [note the below graph has not been updated through September yet, and there were minor changes in the prior few months]:
 

Recall that prices paid and received are part of the regional Fed reports. These are all now current through November, so the update on Friday is considerably more important than this two-month-old data.

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