While Washington is locked in high stakes negotiations over the fiscal cliff, the economy is doing just fine, thank you. It's not flourishing, but it is not recessing either, according to the seasonal Christmas shopping reports. Consider the following:
Sales for the full first weekend of holiday shopping -- Thursday through Sunday -- were 13 percent higher versus a year ago, according to the National Retail Federation. On average, each customer spent 6.3 percent more than last year. ComScore says online Black Friday sales were up 26 percent from a year ago and surpassed $1 billion for the first time ever. Online sales on Thanksgiving Day were up 32 percent. This strength was confirmed by Coremetrics, an online data gatherer affiliated w...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
What You Need to Know Today: Harvest pressure in the U.S. sent corn and soybeans lower as supplies increased and there were signs USDA’s upward revisions to yields in the October WASDE could be close to right. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalated over the weekend, with Ukrai...
Developer's Note 24 August 2026: WPI recently completed an exercise that updated the codebase for this app and solved some of the discrepancies between our five-year average calculation and USDA's. There are a few lingering cases where early (late) starts (finishes) to the crop cycle resu...
