This week was a fairly big week for news, to say the least. The Presidential Polls are tightening, WikiLeaks is in full force, and Deletegate expanded on Friday.  There were also some economic indicators released, in case you or your news source missed it.

(Oct 24) This week one of the headline stories was the Obamacare influenced spikes in health care expenses across the nation, as the new premium and deductible information was released. Last week we received the Consumer Price Index report which revealed that health insurance was up over 8% from September to September. This past Summer the Kaiser Family Foundation released its Annual  Employers Health Benefit Survey. This week the column "Obama(S)care: Rising Premiums, Deductibles, Responsibility" dove into the Kaiser report and found that Employees are paying a larger share of the cost of employer subsidized health care and that companies with fewer than 50 employees are reducing their health care offerings. 

(Oct 25) The monthly Treasury Statement was released last week with little fanfare. This week this column published an article "Decimated Defense Spending, $19.7 Trillion Debt. " The spending on Health and Human Services, the implementers of the Affordable Care Act, has surged  from $891 billion to $1.1 trillion between FY2011 and FY 2016. The defense budget has been decimated, reduced by over 10%, from $678 billion to $565 billion. And the debt has continued to increase from the $10 trillion President Obama inherited to $19.7 trillion. Unpatriotic. Irresponsible.

(Oct 26) The housing data has been "better than a sharp stick in the eye." We had a Housing Recession that began during 2005 when units started dropping as sales prices continued rising through the Summer of 2006. Then the recession picked up pace as sales prices and units sold fell through 2010. We have been in recovery mode ever since. We have had weak new home construction data and new home sales data by historic measures (the past 40 years.)The column "September New Home Sales Slower than 1983, 1992" places a historic perspective in the current data. 

(Oct 27) What is up with the weekly Unemployment Claims report? The data is misleading, is "what is up." We do not have a streak of 86 weeks of under 300,000 seasonally adjusted first-time claims. First-time Claims  recorded a gain, non-seasonally adjusted (NSA,) and were reported (SA) as declining. The NSA Continuing Claims number recorded a decrease and reported an increase in claims. "Unemployment Claim Down is Up, Up is Down" goes into detail on the report.

There is a ton of chaos in the media. The ship, the economy, is traveling through icebergs during the month of October. People are sleeping and partying on the Titanic II.  Will the ship brush against some icebergs this month? Will the Jobs report next week indicate that the ship is taking on water faster than it can pump it? Will some Hillary revelation take the eye off the ball for the mainstream media?

It's the economy.