Construction Economic News

The accompanying table records the top 10 project starts in the United States for August 2022.

Clichés are often true and it is the case that a picture can be worth a thousand words.

September’s Employment Situation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the total number of jobs in the U.S. economy rose by +263,000 last month. The gain in employment of a quarter of a million jobs was the weakest showing among all the months of this year so far, but it was still a pretty decent number. It’s not the sort of figure one would expect if the economy were becoming mired in a recession. That may still happen, but it isn’t necessarily here yet.

A strange thing is happening with the U.S. foreign trade balance. It’s improving significantly. It’s no longer as steeply in the hole as it was. And why this is so unusual is because it’s occurring while the value of the U.S. dollar is rising, making imports cheaper and more attractive and rendering exports more expensive and, therefore, a harder sell.

There are aspects to the current inflation problem that deserve an airing. First, while the U.S. all-items CPI-U increase, often referred to as the headline rate, is +8.3% y/y and the core rate, which leaves out price-volatile food and energy items, is +6.3% y/y, there is another measure that isn’t nearly as extreme.

In the United States, the Federal Reserve has just raised its key policy-setting interest rate, the federal funds rate, into a range from 3.00% to 3.25%. The intent is to cool inflation, which is +8.3% year over year for the Consumer Price Index (i.e., CPI-U, with U standing for urban consumers). The U.S. core inflation rate is +6.3%. Core leaves out price-volatile energy and food items.

There will be a lot riding on the hoped-for success of the U.S. manufacturing sector over the decade-plus ahead if the goals concerning carbon emission reductions by mid-century are to be met. There will need to be tremendously large investments in electric vehicle production line expansions, new EV battery plants, computer chipmaking operations, and in the fabrication of all the building products that will go into renewable electricity generation, utility-sized power storage units, coast-to-coast recharging stations, new hydrogen extraction facilities, and so on.

The accompanying table records the top 10 project starts in the United States for August 2022.

Clichés are often true and it is the case that a picture can be worth a thousand words.

August Found July To Be Hard Act To Follow ConstructConnect announced today that August 2022’s volume of construction starts, excluding residential work, was $40.0 billion, a decrease of -26.3% compared with July’s figure of $54.3 billion (originally reported as $53.7 billion).