This exercise will give you a chance to examine data on some of the leading economic indicators.

a. Download the data for new privately owned housing units authorized by building permits from www.census.gov/construction/bps. Choose the seasonally adjusted data for the United States in an Excel format. Graph the “Total” series. 

b. Search for the last five years of data for manufacturers’ new orders of nondefense capital goods from the St. Louis Federal Reserve site at research.stlouisfed.org. Graph the data. 

c. Locate data for the average weekly hours of production workers in manufacturing, available at www.bls.gov/lpc/#tables. for Hours of Wage and Salary Workers. (This is part of current employment statistics.) Choose Manufacturing as the sector and Average Weekly Hours as the measure. Retrieve the report for the past five years. Create a graph of the data that shows the quarterly trend over the last five years. 

d. The data series you retrieved are all leading economic indicators. Based on the tables and your graphs, what is your opinion of where the economy is heading in the near future?