Warm Weather May Bump NFP Print to Big League, Top Forecasters Say
Nonfarm payrolls will beat the 200,000 Bloomberg consensus estimate for February, according to leading forecasters of this data. Claims for unemployment insurance have hovered near almost 44-year lows, and economists, including top-rated jobs forecaster Jim O’Sullivan of High Frequency Economics, note that a warmer temperatures last month should boost outdoor jobs. (Bloomberg Briefs)
U.S. Productivity Rose at 1.3% Rate in 4th Quarter The productivity of U.S. workers increased last year at the slowest pace since 2011, a sign the economy continues to be plagued by long-term ailments despite recent momentum.
Productivity, or how many goods and services U.S. workers produced per hour, grew 0.2% last year compared with the prior year, the Labor Department said Wednesday. It expanded 0.9% in 2015 and 0.8% in 2014. (…)
The report also showed that unit labor costs—a measure of wages and benefits for American workers—grew at a 1.7% rate in the fourth quarter compared with the prior three months. (Table from Haver Analytics)
Manhattan Rents Decline for Apartments of Every Size
Rents fell last month for Manhattan apartments of all sizes, the first across-the-board price decline in at least four years, as a construction boom brought more buildings to market and allowed some tenants to leave for bigger or newer units.
For studios, which held their own last year while costs for bigger apartments slid, the median rent dropped 2.6 percent, appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate said in a report Thursday. (…)
Apartments available for rent at the end of February numbered 6,872, a jump of almost 12 percent from a year earlier. The number of new leases fell 28 percent last month to 3,634. (…)
China Inflation Heads Off in Two Directions China’s consumer-price index in February was up just 0.8% from a year earlier, slowing from January’s 2.5% pace, while the producer-price index was up 7.8%, its biggest jump since September 2008.
OIL
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Amazing!
US shale production is becoming more efficient.
Source: @nolahoubear (Via The Daily Shot)
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Worrying!
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Bulging!
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Sinking!
Harold Hamm, the billionaire shale oilman, said the U.S. industry could “kill” the oil market if it embarks into another spending binge, a rare warning in a business focused on fast growth to compete with OPEC.
The statement, at an energy conference in Houston on Wednesday, comes as top shale companies announce large increases in spending for this year, and the U.S. government says domestic oil output next year will surpass the record high set in 1970. (…)
Corporate Insiders Haven’t Been This Uninterested in Buying Stocks Since Reagan Was President
(…) There were a total of 279 insider buyers in January, the lowest in records of publicly traded companies that are required to disclose going back to 1988, according to the Washington Service, a provider of insider-trading data and analytics.
Meanwhile, the number of sellers has been above average, pushing a ratio of buyers to sellers in February to its lowest since 1988. (…)
“It’s not that insider selling is aggressive right now, it’s that there’s not a lot of insider buying,” Mr. Silverman said. (…)
