The parade of mostly weaker data rolled on today with the releases of; Initial Jobless Claims, Pending Home sales, Productivity and Factory orders.

First, a bit of ephemeral and aberrant upbeat data. The index of pending existing home rose 5.2 percent after a revised 2.8 percent drop the prior month, figures from the National Association of Realtors showed today in Washington.

First Time Jobless claims showed that the number of Americans seeking jobless benefits fell last week to a level that indicates the labor market has not improved this year. Initial jobless claims dropped by 6,000 to 472,000 in the week ended Aug. 28, the Labor Department said. But those applications exceeded the 463,000 average so far this year. And the drop of 6k was produced only after the prior week was revised up by 5k. Most importantly, the continuing claims number now stands at 4.46 million and the number of individuals collecting emergency benefits is 5.44 million. Those numbers are a slight improvement but still clearly illustrate the structural problem we have with unemployment in the U.S.

Factory orders rose less than the 0 .2 percent forecast in July, restrained by a slump in demand for capital equipment, a Commerce Department report also showed today. The 0.1 percent rise in bookings followed a 0.6 percent decrease in June.

And finally, the output per unit of labor input fell sharply in Q2. The productivity of U.S. workers fell more than previously estimated in the second quarter, pushing up labor costs and showing the slowdown in growth will limit profits, another Labor Department report today showed. The measure of employee output per hour dropped at a 1.8 percent annual rate, the biggest decline in almost four years, compared with the 0.9 percent decrease initially calculated, according to the revised figures. Labor expenses rose at a 1.1 percent pace, the most in more than a year.

So these data points continue to flash a warning sign that the stagflationary environment is now fully entrenched in the economy.

Michael Pento, Senior Economist at Euro Pacific Capital is a well-established specialist in the “Austrian School” of economics. He is a regular guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, and other national media outlets and his market analysis can be read in most major financial publications, including the Wall Street Journal. Prior to joining Euro Pacific, Michael worked for a boutique investment advisory firm to create ETFs and UITs that were sold throughout Wall Street. Earlier in his career, he worked on the floor of the NYSE.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Please feel free to repost with proper attribution and all links included.