The August number of 0.4% increase results in a year-over-year increase of 4.3%. Bad news is this is the highest increase in PCE since 1991, all the way back when Pres. Bush was in office. That is a 30-year high in the inflation rate as measured by PCE.
Looks like there is another flood of reporting ready to appear in print on bank secrecy and hiding wealth.
This project will be called the Pandora Papers.
If you recall, a major series of reports back in the 2016 timeframe described money laundering efforts flowing through one particular law firm in Panama. You can read my comments on the coverage.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) brought together around 600 journalists from about 150 media outlets to analyze a data leak with 2.94 TB of info. That’s terabytes, as in thousands of gigabytes.
If you are at all interested in offshore banking, or money laundering, or the world-far-away of hiding or relocating wealth even without nefarious intent, you will want to pay attention.
Looks like there will be a lot of coverage, what with 330 politicians and 130 people on the Forbes billionaire list showing up in the data.
From a first glance, it looks like this project have as one focus the structure of banks and professionals that service this market.
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.
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:
