Construction Economic News

There’s no getting away from it, the opening sentence of a story on present economic circumstances has to feature inflation. So that’s where we’ll begin our Nuggets report this month, with the first point below laying out the broad strokes. Then we’ll delve deeper into today’s pricing and costing structures, and what additional knock-on implications are being revealed by other recent public and private sector data releases.

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

June Tried, but Didn’t Match May for Megas ConstructConnect announced today that June 2022's volume of construction starts, excluding residential work, was $47.5 billion (green shaded box, bottom of page 11), a decrease of -24.3% versus May’s figure of $62.7 billion (previously reported as $63.4 billion). The sizable drop was to be expected, given that May had such an exceptional array of mega-sized project groundbreakings.

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

In the United States in June, according to the latest Employment Situation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs creation maintained a strong pace, +372,000, although it didn’t quite keep up with the average through the first five months of this year, +474,000.

In stock market parlance, a bear market refers to a decline from recent peak of -20% or more.