US Daily Commentary

Research evidence excerpt

US Daily Commentary

Global Markets Research

28 July 2026US Daily Commentary

Economics - North America

Research Analysts

Review & Preview North America Economics

Review Aichi Amemiya - NSI aichi.amemiya@nomura.com

Advancegoodstradebalance: The Goods trade deficit narrowed to $101.5bn in June +1 212 667 9347

(Nomura: $104.bn, Consensus: 100.0bn) from $105.8bn in May. Imports fell 2.6% m-o-m, Jeremy Schwartz - NSI

driven by a broad-based decline across categories. Exports fell 1.8% m-o-m, led by a drop jeremy.schwartz@nomura.com

in industrial supplies and capital goods exports. +1 212 667 9637

Q2GDPtrackingestimate: We have lowered our Q2 GDP tracking estimate to 1.8% Ruchir Sharma - NSI

from 2.4% previously. However, the downgrade was driven by inventories, which tend to ruchir.sharma@nomura.com

+1 212 667 9186be volatile. Our tracking estimate for real final sales to private domestic purchasers (a

proxy of domestic final demand), remained unchanged at 3.4%.

Retail inventories surprised to the downside, weighing on Q2 GDP. Retail inventories were

flat in June (Consensus: +0.4%) with a downward revision to the May number. This

suggests inventory investment in Q2 was softer than previously expected.

Consumerconfidence: The Conference Board consumer confidence index came in

close to our expectations, ticking down to 90.8 in July (Nomura: 90.5, Consensus: 92.4)

from an upwardly revised 92.2 in June. Current conditions worsened, while expectations

remained unchanged in the month.

The labor differential (jobs plentiful minus jobs hard to get) ticked down to 3.1 in July from

an upwardly revised 3.8 in June, its lowest level since February 2021 (Fig.1). Measures

of job finding have been mixed lately, but overall we have not seen strong signs of

acceleration in labor demand yet.