Indonesia

We’ve added daily food prices published by the central bank. The dataset is broken down by several markets: “modern,” “producer trade” (otherwise known as farmers’ markets), “traditional,” and wholesale.

In the chart below, we focused on the wholesale market. We used prices for 31 food items to calculate a diffusion index, measuring how many of these items are reporting an increase based on their three-month annualised percentage change. We charted this figure against the headline consumer price index, measured on the same basis.

Food is important for inflation; it has a 20 percent weighting in the headline CPI. As the chart shows, at the start of the year, prices for all of our 31 food items were rising on that three-month annualised basis. Today, less than half of the items in the basket are still seeing price increases. This slowdown has helped inflation gradually recede to more historically reasonable levels.

United States

In our Charts of the Week for July 7, we examined how US construction was being driven by the manufacturing sector as residential building slowed. To complement the dataset from that chart, we’ve just added monthly regional breakdowns for manufacturing construction. 

In the chart below, we calculated the contribution of each US region, as defined by the Census Bureau, to total private construction spending.

Private construction spending started to ramp up in 2021, and for some time, the Mountain region (in gray) was the largest contributor to overall growth. Today, the East North Central region – represented in purple – is the largest contributor. It comprises five industrial Great Lakes states: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

Saudi Arabia

More real-estate indicators are now available for the kingdom, allowing Macrobond users to compare transactions for villas and apartments across major cities as well as the evolution of the average price per square metre. 

Earlier in the year, a housing shortage in Saudia Arabia made headlines amid an influx of expats. Foreign firms doing business in the kingdom were required to establish a local office by the end of this year to keep their government contracts. (A wave of talented football players began heading to the kingdom, as well.)

Has this demand boom stalled? As our chart demonstrates, transactions for villas decreased significantly in Q3 2023, falling below 1,000. Average prices per square metre are also in retreat after two years of year-on-year growth.