Japan

Soaring egg prices are in the news around the world. Avian influenza outbreaks have decimated poultry stocks, making food inflation even worse. 

In this context, we’ve added daily prices from Ja.Z-Tamago Co.,Ltd, a leading Japanese egg company. Prices are available for four cities and broken down by different categories of eggs.

In the chart below, we calculated the average egg price in Tokyo across all categories. As prices soar, it’s no surprise that eggs are being removed from restaurant menus, as the BBC reports.

United States

We’ve added a dataset tracking the number of workers affected by WARN notices. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act was enacted in 1988 and requires employers to provide a 60-day notification before mass layoff plans or plant closures. 

It is not mandatory for states to publish WARN notices online, so only 39 of the 50 are available so far. 

Given the recent wave of layoffs in the headlines, we wondered how the trend for 2023 compares to previous years. In the chart below, we average the years since 1990 to show the typical, cumulative progression of workers impacted by WARN notices over the calendar year. The bars show the 20-80 percentile range for the yearly data points. 

(The significant outlier was 2020, where pandemic layoffs were so extreme that the year was excluded from the calculations and put on the separate, second pane.) 

So far, 2023, in green, is starting off well above the historic mean; WARN notices are close to the 80^th percentile.   

Mexico

We’ve added a new segment from the Bank of Mexico’s surveys. It tracks private-sector expectations for core CPI for each of the upcoming 12 months.

In the chart below, we combined each monthly data point into a single series depicting private-sector expectations. We then compared it to the official Bank of Mexico forecast for core CPI. The central bank and the private sector are aligned in their expectations: core inflation has peaked and will descend rapidly.