Construction Economic News

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

Megaprojects Seized the Spotlight Again ConstructConnect announced today that July 2022’s volume of construction starts, excluding residential work, was $53.7 billion, an increase of +12.2% compared with June’s figure of $47.9 billion (originally reported as $47.5 billion).

Changes are happening quickly with respect to costs and prices in the economy. This article, in tables and graphs, sets out the latest Producer Price Index results published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It’ll be hard for anyone to find much fault with July’s Employment Situation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The total number of jobs gained during the month was +528,000, which beat the previous six-month average of +461,000. Interestingly, it was just about a match for January-to-June 2021’s average of +533,000.

U.S. real, i.e., inflation-adjusted, gross domestic product contracted by -0.9% in the second quarter of this year, on the heels of a -1.6% slide in the first quarter. (By way of contrast, Q4 2021 pulled ahead by +6.9%).

You’ll often hear that the residential real estate market will be the first among all players in the economy to signal a cyclical change—e.g., from recession to recovery or vice versa—brought on by central bank interest rate action.

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.