Uncategorized

Personal Consumption Expenditure for August 2021 shows ongoing inflation.

The Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) inflation index again shows an increase of 0.4% in August 2021 after increasing the same in July. Since December 2020 this index has shown inflation of between 0.3% and 0.6% each month.

This indicates that inflation is continuing. Good news is that inflation is slowing, declining from 0.6% in March and April, to 0.5% in May and June, to 0.4% in July and August.

Bad news is annualizing the running three month inflation rate shows between 4% and 7% since February.

Total number of people drawing state and federal unemployment is declining slowly.

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The number of people with continuing claims for unemployment in the regular state programs and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment compensation programs is volatile, showing large swings from week to week. However, the total does not seem to dropping very fast.

Since the week of 9/19/20, I have been pulling that data off the weekly press release from the Department of Labor. Current weekly report is: Unemployment insurance weekly claims.

The weekly data since then, excluding one week I missed, is: