Weekly Economic Update 08-14-26: Small Business Optimism; Existing Home Sales; Consumer Price Index; Producer Price Index; and Retail Sales

Inflation is taking a breather...but is it all due to last month's drop in energy? And it looks like the consumer is taking a break as well.

The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Georgia Institute of Technology or the Georgia Board of Regents. 

Substack has introduced a new feature online…a button you can push to see how much of an article was written by AI. Apparently, some SubStack writers have been using AI to write their articles.

Now, I openly admit, I use AI each week to go out, grab all the data, report the highlights so I can see what moved, and update all my charts on economicsguru.com. I have even been known to cut-and-paste from that data pull and do my own editing if I am in a time crunch. Otherwise, I hammer this out myself from a blank page every week.

After PPI came out Thursday, I was getting ready to send my draft to my proofreaders (yes, I have people who proofread this every Thursday night and give me feedback/corrections). I decided to test out the “AI detection” button for myself.

It came back as 41% written by AI, 0% AI-assisted, and 59% human.

Needless to say, that was a little annoying since I sat here and hammered this out, a little bit every evening, myself. I guess the AI detector searches for certain “tells.” For example, recently, it has been pointed out that AI writing includes a lot of “—” for emphasis or parenthetical expressions. Now, I have always been a huge fan of “—” in my writing — I use it all the time. (See what I did there…)

But apparently, that is a “tell.” I guess there are other “tells” because I can assure you that this week, this post is 100% human.

So, I hammered out the PPI write-up, and the “One More Thing” I always tack on at the end, and re-ran the test for “AI-generated text.” Now I was up to 64% written by AI, 0% AI-assisted, and 36% human. It was getting worse.

So, as usual, the final bit was this introduction. I sat down and wrote this just before sending it to the proofreaders. When it was complete…20% AI, 80% human. Better. But not correct.

While I love AI, and I find it a very useful tool, it does make mistakes. Either that, or I am turning into a robot and my consciousness is becoming merged with the machines. (Given how much I am online, not an unrealistic scenario.)

But none of this has anything to do with economics, so let me get to it…

Small Business Optimism

The week started Tuesday morning with NFIB’s July Small Business Optimism Index (full release here). The index rose 2.4 points to 99.8 — the highest since August 2025, and the first month above the survey’s 52-year average of 98.0 since last February, although it is still slightly below where it was a year ago.

For new readers, the NFIB index is a diffusion index that uses ten questions where owners answer “better,” “same,” or “worse.” It measures what small business owners think is happening, and small business owners have been in a lousy mood since the spring.