Written by Michael Thervil
As you should know by now, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes news on America's economic outlook on the first Friday of every month. According to the BLS published report, unemployment rates were higher than expected in October with 272 out of 389 of the most populated cities in the United States tackling joblessness. Even though most Americans would like to place all the blame on the American government, much of the unemployment claims stem from the onslaught of hurricanes Helene and Milton which severely impacted the southern states of the United States. In addition to that, many people went on strike in the manufacturing and logistics sectors. Employee strikes from both Boeing and Longshoremen played a significant role in the number of people who file joblessness claims.
When talking about what’s driving the failing numbers of the economic outlook of the United States, the best way to gauge it is to look at the Consumer Price Index or CPI. According to the CPI numbers that came in for November, the major sectors that were highlighted were “Food”, “energy”, and “All Items Less Food and Energy”, and a sum of “All Items”. While the Food sector was up 2.1%, the Energy sector fell negative to -4.9%. When it comes to drilling down to the Food sector, Americans still chose to spend more on dining out (3.8%) than eating at home (1.1%). Again, the cost of groceries is still astronomically high, especially when considering the role of inflation and how it affects the entire sector.
When American consumers do eat at home, they are consuming more meats, poultry, fish, eggs, (1.9%) and non-alcoholic beverages (1.7%) than anything. Keep in mind that dairy and related products come in at 1.3% and fall into a close third being non-alcoholic beverages. If you take a look at what Americans are spending their money on when it comes to dining out, they are roughly spending the same amount of money on both full-service meals and snacks and limited-service meals and snacks. This begs the questions: “are Americans getting lazier”? or is it easier to simply dine out than eat at home as fast-food restaurants are purposely becoming cheaper?”. The question is worth examining because fast food retail chains are competing to see who can offer the cheapest “value meals”.
Looking at Energy, “Energy Commodities” are way down, we’re talking -12.4% while Energy Services are up just by 4.0% in November. If you take the time out to examine Energy Commodities, you’ll see that they’re both in the negative with fuel oil down by -20.8% and gasoline of all types sitting in the negative at -12.2%. Energy Services on the other hand rose to 4.0%and within that sector of the U.S. economy, electricity was up 4.5% and natural gas was up at 2.0%. With percentages this low it could be a no brainer why the U.S. is pushing the UK to buy American gas versus gas that comes from Russia.
In a nutshell this November’s CPI report can be summed up as:
“to hell with the people affected by natural disasters and go out and eat shit processed foods because it’s too expensive to dine at home and eat fresh food, and sabotage both the UK and Ukraine’s ability to get Russian gas that’s cheaper because we need them to buy our gas in order to stay in step with our economic outlook.”
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