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163 articles
Articles
- ÉclairageHousing & Urban Development
Housing units authorised by permit fell in every year after 2021 and are now below their 2020 reading
The series peaked at a monthly average of 1734 thousand units in 2021 and has come down in each of the four years since, to 1431 in 2025. The thirty-year mortgage rate reached its own high in 2023 and has eased in the two years since, and authorisations fell in both of them.
- CommentaireTrade & Investment
A trade agreement is worth the terms it fixes and not the exports it is credited with
Exports of goods and services rose at every step from 2021 to 2025, from 2.57 trillion dollars to 3.32, and any instrument in force across those years can be credited with a line that was rising regardless. The same window also prices what an agreement actually sells: the broad dollar index moved 8.7 percent between the low and high of six annual averages, and nobody negotiated that.
- DécryptageDevelopment Finance
What a municipal bond pays for and who repays it
A municipal bond is a loan from investors to a government. By the end you will know what the money is allowed to buy, which pocket the repayment comes out of, and why two bonds sold by the same city in the same week can rest on completely different promises.
- CommentaireMultilateral Institutions
Sovereign restructuring was built for a world where delay cost the creditor nothing
Reprofiling worked because a payment pushed out ten years cost the creditor nothing in real terms, and in 2020 the implied real ten-year yield was minus 0.60 percent. In 2025 it was plus 1.96 percent, so the same extension now costs a real 17.6 percent, and a process whose only enforcement is peer pressure has to arrange that loss.
- CommentaireCapital Markets
A country should build its export credit agency for speed, because it does not set the terms
The base an export credit is priced against moved 3.40 points on the ten-year Treasury between 2020 and 2025, and the policy rate moved 3.34 points from one year to the next. Those are larger than any margin an agency concedes, which leaves the signing date as the one term it owns, and a fast agency is worth having only if it can also refuse quickly.
- ÉclairageMacroeconomics & Markets
Producer prices fell in two straight years and are still below the 2022 peak
The all-commodities producer price index reached 264.5 in 2022, fell twice, and at 260.3 in 2025 has not regained it. It also sits 65.9 points above 2020.
- ÉclairageEconomic Security
Federal debt rises every year but the annual addition has no trend
The stock goes from 28.7 to 37.1 trillion dollars across five observations. The four annual additions behind that run 2.1, 1.9, 2.6 and 1.8 trillion, and the most recent is the smallest of them.
- DécryptageTrade & Investment
What counts as foreign direct investment
Foreign direct investment is a category of financing, not a category of building. By the end of this you will know what the statistic records, why an announced project is not a flow, and why the money's origin is invisible in the activity it pays for.
- DécryptageInfrastructure
What contingency in a capital budget is for
Contingency is neither padding nor a slush fund. By the end you will know what it is sized against, who is allowed to release it, and why a budget with none in it is not a cheaper budget.
- ÉclairageWorkforce & Skills
The fall in unemployment was finished by 2022, and the rate has risen since
The rate dropped from 8.1 percent in 2020 to 3.7 in 2022, reached a low of 3.6 in 2023, and has risen in both readings since, to 4.3.
- ÉclairageIndustrial Policy
Factory construction spending fell in 2025 after four straight years of increase
The monthly average rose from 75 billion dollars in 2020 to 244 billion in 2024, then fell to 215 billion in 2025, the only fall in six readings. Nonresidential construction spending, from the same agency and on the same basis, rose in that same year.
- CommentaireInfrastructure
Three flat years of housing starts is a result, not a pause
Starts have run at 1.42, 1.37 and 1.36 million units since 2023, below where the window opened in 2020. The dollars going into construction rose through the same period, and the dollars are what gets quoted.
- ÉclairageEconomic Security
The industrial index has spent six years going almost nowhere
Industrial production ended 2025 at 101.2 on a 2017 base of 100. It has moved 1.9 points in four years, and the 2025 reading sits 0.2 above 2022.
- DécryptageDevelopment Finance
What an offtake agreement does
An offtake agreement is a promise to buy something that has not been made yet. By the end you will know what it changes for a lender, what it costs the seller, and what it leaves unsolved.
- ÉclairageEconomic Security
American payrolls keep growing, and each year adds less than the one before
Total nonfarm payrolls rose in every annual reading from 2020 to 2025. The size of the rise has fallen three years running, from 6.2 million jobs to 700,000.
- DécryptageInfrastructure
What a cost overrun is measured against
An overrun is a comparison, and the figure it is compared with usually goes unstated. By the end you will know which baselines are in use, and why the same project can be on budget and over budget at once.
- ÉclairageEconomic Security
Retail sales rose in every year of the window, counted in dollars
The monthly rate went from 601.2 billion dollars in 2021 to 724.4 in 2025 with no down year. The largest single-year rise landed in the same year as the largest rise in the price level.
- CommentaireEconomic Security
An economy that exports eleven percent of its output is hard to coerce
The Bureau of Economic Analysis puts exports at 11 percent of GDP. That number disappoints anyone who wants trade to be the growth engine and reassures anyone who thinks a trade fight is cheap. Both readings make the same mistake about what an average is.
- PerspectiveLabor Markets
Healthcare employs more people at higher median pay than production work, which does not mean a transition has held anywhere
Summed across the fifty-one jurisdictions in the 2025 occupational file, healthcare practitioners outnumber production workers by 1,258,080, and in all fifty-one the practitioner median wage is the higher of the two. The jurisdiction most concentrated in that work has the third-lowest median wage of the fifty-one.
- DécryptageTrade & Investment
What an export credit agency does for a sale abroad
An export credit agency is a public body that takes on the risk a commercial bank will not, so that a domestic exporter can sell to a foreign buyer on credit. By the end you should be able to follow the transaction and see where the public exposure actually sits.