Economic Indicators

A weekly briefing on the economic calendar Monday Earnings reports: 3M, Delta Air Lines, Legg Mason, Allstate, Kraft Foods Tuesday * Housing starts and building permits for June Earnings reports: Altria, Ameritrade, Boise Cascade, Ford Motor, Manpower, RadioShack, U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo, E*Trade, Motorola, Pixelworks, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments Wednesday Earnings reports: AT&T Wireless, Blockbuster, Eastman Kodak, Fannie Mae, General...

Economic indicators Tuesday: April retail sales Wednesday: March inventories, April consumer price index, capacity utilization, industrial production Thursday: April housing starts, weekly jobless claims Friday: March trade balance Wednesday American Association of Individual Investors dinner meeting and discussion, 5 p.m., Snyders Willow Grove, 841 Hammonds Ferry Road, Linthicum. The topic is noncommissioned life insurance. Cost is $30. Reservations required. Call Joan Taavon at 410-938-2244.

The entire staff of the University of Baltimore's Regional Economic Studies Program will jump to Towson State University next month, where they plan to launch an index of national leading economic indicators to compete with traditional forecasting methods.The university hopes that the new index and a new method for forecasting job growth will put its obscure business school on the map, much the way Georgia State University has won notice for an economics team whose inflation forecasting model is widely respected.

Economic indicators for Baltimore and Maryland turned upward in July, the second of three months showing an improvement. It's an indication that the region may be headed for better economic times.But economists are reluctant to make forecasts until the numbers -- called the index of leading economic indicators -- rise for three consecutive months. Preliminary economic figures for August -- the first to come in after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait -- already show some deterioration.Still, said Dr. Michael Conte, director of the University of Baltimore's Center for Business and Economic Studies, the July upturns are a healthy sign.

Both the leading economic indicators for Baltimore and Maryland -- and the region's labor markets -- provided strong signals in September that the area is heading toward a recession.The Index of Leading Economic Indicators, which predicts future economic activity, dropped sharply in both Baltimore and Maryland in September. The Maryland index fell 2.06 percent, and the Baltimore index suffered its second monthly decline with a drop of 1.65 percent.While the U.S. index had been flat or on the decline through the summer, the local indexes showed strength in most months from May to August.

Getting a bunch of economists to agree on anything is tough. Getting them to agree on which economic indicators are most important for investors is another matter entirely. Nonetheless, a group of the nation's top economic analysts offered their views to try to sort out which economic indicators are the most valuable for everyday investors to watch. And then they indicated which ones they found overrated, unhelpful or for some reason irrelevant in today's markets. As expected, it wasn't always pretty.

After years of stagnation, home values in Howard County soon may creep up again, thanks to strong job growth, particularly among high-paying jobs, economic analysts say.Though county officials remain cautious, the latest edition of the county's quarterly Economic Indicators report is upbeat about the local economy.Some independent economists go further, predicting that more good news is coming, even for long-suffering homeowners, who have seen the assessed values of homes stall for several years.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. index of leading economic indicators rose in December for the third straight month, a sign the recession may end by the middle of this year. The 1.2 percent increase in the Conference Board's forecasting gauge, released yesterday, followed gains of 0.8 percent in November and 0.1 percent in October. It was the largest rise since February 1996, when the United States was bouncing back from East Coast snowstorms a month earlier. Three increases in a row in the index mirror other signs of improvement in the economy, now in its first recession in a decade.

More and more economists are predicting that the economy, in wimp-like fashion, will backpedal into a recession, and soon. With oil prices spiraling upward, growth may fall to zero, or below. This week will provide several important measures of the economic pulse, including the latest revision of the gross national product for the second quarter, due out tomorrow.At last measure, GNP was seen to be rising at a barely perceptible 1.2 percent annual rate. Whether that rate has slowed still further is conjectural, but few economists are saying the economy has leaped forward.

Maryland's unemployment rate declined by 0.1 percentage point in October, to 5.0 percent from the previous month, the state Department of Economic and Employment Development said yesterday.Both the state's employment level and its labor force reached new highs for the month of October.More than 8,600 entered or re-entered the labor market, increasing the total work force to 2,718,479. But 11,706 more people had jobs in October than in September, bringing the state's total employment to 2,582,312 and trimming the unemployment rolls by nearly 3,100 despite the new entrants to the work force.