Chief Economics Correspondent
Daniel Okonjo covers the macro data cycle, from payrolls and CPI prints to the revisions almost nobody reads. He worked as a forecaster at a macro research shop and later at a sovereign wealth fund's economics unit, where he learned to distrust any single month of data. He writes the desk's guide to every major release, published the evening before it lands.
Core goods prices crossed from negative to flat in June, ending a disinflationary contribution that ran for twenty-two months. Bellweather Macro estimates the trade measures announced so far have another 0.2 to 0.3 points still to deliver.
The Marlowe Institute nowcast has core services inflation running at 3.4 per cent annualised over three months, barely below where it sat in March. Goods disinflation has stopped doing the work it did for two years.
Net hiring intentions on the Marlowe Institute small business survey dropped to 8 per cent, and the firms reporting harder credit conditions are the same ones planning to shrink headcount. The transmission from the long end of the curve runs through here.
The Verity payroll panel shows private employment growth of 31,000 a month across the summer, with health care, utilities and defence adjacent contracting supplying almost all of it. The quits rate is back to 2016 levels.
Sixty day delinquencies in securitised subprime auto pools have risen for eleven straight months. The 2024 vintage is performing worse at the same age than the 2019 one did, and refinancing is not available to fix it.
Private inflation and activity estimates arrive weeks before the government statistic and are built from different raw material. Understanding what they measure explains most of the gaps, and the gaps are where the trading opportunity sits.
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