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gdp

The CES response-rate gap and why the two-month back-revision is the higher-signal number inside the 8:30 ET NFP release

The initial CES nonfarm payrolls print lands with a first-close establishment-survey response rate near 65 percent. The two-month back-revision incorporates responses closer to 93 percent. The last twelve months of releases have carried a net downward revision of roughly 45 thousand per month across the two revision rounds combined. The strip has learned to price the revision as the higher-signal line, and the desk reads the 8:30 ET stamp as three prints, not one.

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gdp

ISM manufacturing employment printed 52.8 in July, the first expansion read in fourteen months

The July ISM manufacturing employment sub-index at 52.8 broke a fourteen-month contraction streak. History says a single-month cross above 50 after a long contraction has a 40 to 50 percent false-positive rate before manufacturing payrolls follow.
rates

PMI diffusion index mechanics: what a print above 50 actually measures, and why a headline miss walks the strip further than the payroll surprise does

A PMI is a diffusion index, not an average. Every respondent gets one of three answers (better, same, worse), and the headline is the share saying better plus half the share saying same. That construction is why the 49 to 51 band is the recession-versus-expansion knife-edge, why a two-point miss on the headline is a two-and-a-half-sigma event historically, and why the front-end rates desk carries the ISM manufacturing print with a hair-trigger the AHE line does not get.
gdp

The Employment Cost Index is the wages line the Fed prices against: why the quarterly ECI outranks the monthly average hourly earnings print

Average hourly earnings is the wages line the tape reads on the first Friday of every month. The Employment Cost Index is the wages line the Fed reads at the end of every quarter. The ECI corrects for the two composition biases that push AHE around on a monthly cadence (mix shift across industries and mix shift within occupations), and it splits total compensation into wages, salaries, and benefits. When the FOMC statement or the SEP paragraph talks about wages, it is talking about ECI.
gdp
The one line the tape reads on durable goods day
rates
The FOMC blackout: what stops for ten days, what keeps trading, and how the strip re-prices when the mic opens back up
rates
Bid-to-cover and the tail: how to read a Treasury auction stop in five numbers

@% publishes short macroeconomic articles. The number, the context, why it moved. Most macro journalism buries one data point under fifteen paragraphs. We do the opposite. Published by AT Media Group. No stock picks. No padding.