The second quarter is behind us, but no one knows how fast the economy grew during those months — or even whether it grew, Axios' Felix Salmon writes.

Why it matters: The economics and statistics professions are still a very long way from the dream of being able to access a rich stream of real-time data to get a handle on what's happening, broadly, in the economy as a whole.

Driving the news: Payroll processor ADP has teamed up with Stanford's Digital Economy Lab to try to create an employment report that gives the kind of up-to-date information that economists (and journalists) crave. The team's first report will be released on Aug. 31.

• "People want more real-time fine-grained information," Stanford's Erik Brynjolfsson tells Axios. "There’s a whole lot of things we can do with our data that no one else can do."
• Brynjolfsson anticipates the new report will break down employment not only along the lines of worker demographics but also among different regions. It could also come out weekly, rather than monthly.

The big picture: The statistical gold standard is, still, the set of surveys conducted by the U.S. government, which are laborious, time-consuming, and have ever-expanding error bars in an era where no one much likes filling out government surveys.

• Context: ADP has for many years issued a monthly National Employment Report, timed to come out the day before the U.S. government's official nonfarm payrolls report.
• The methodology has been opaque and has been designed mostly to mirror — and try to anticipate — the official number from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It hasn't been doing a very good job at that, so it makes sense to replace it with a new series that has its own independent utility.

Between the lines: There have been many prior attempts to build economic statistics on top of private-sector data, and few of them have met with much success.

• That's partly because the owners of the data don't like to make it freely available. (Brynjolfsson, however, promises that the ADP data will be easily accessible on FRED.)

The bottom line: The first reading for second-quarter GDP comes out on July 28. For the time being, the consensus of Wall Street economists remains hopeful, at +2.4%; only a robot at the Atlanta Fed is predicting a negative print.

• The monthly jobs report for June comes out today, however. If it's weak, that still leaves plenty of time for economists to update their second-quarter priors.

✍️ Biden to sign executive order on abortion access. (Axios)

💰 FDIC looking into marketing practices of bankrupt crypto brokerage Voyager Digital. (WSJ)

⛔️ IPOs aren't in the cards for 2022. (Axios)

One signal that America's demand for goods is cooling: The cost of shipping is receding quickly, Axios' Kate Marino writes.

What's happening: The spot price to ship in a key corridor, from China and east Asia to the U.S. west coast, will now run you $7,600 per 40-foot container — down a whopping 62% from the brief high above $20,000 last September, according to Freightos, a booking and payments platform for international freight.

• Yes, but: That's still more than three times the average pre-pandemic cost.

The big picture: There's a finite supply of ships to ferry goods from manufacturers in Asia to stateside ports. Last year's skyrocketing prices were driven by demand growth (which this retail sales chart attests), says Zvi Schreiber, Freightos CEO.

• Now: Demand for goods is easing, as Americans shift more of their spending back to services, and as recession worries circulate, he says. More on that below ...

Shipping costs aren't the only sign that the wild ride of soaring demand and prices might be slowing. A global index that tracks costs among companies across both the manufacturing and services sectors fell to a four-month low in June, Emily writes.

• The pullback is due to a mix of easing supply chain woes, less inventory buildup by producers, and a "gloomier economic outlook," writes Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, which compiled the index from surveys of companies in 45 countries.

Why it matters: Signs of cooling demand are everywhere as recession jitters spread. But this is just what the doctor (er, Jerome Powell) ordered, and a sign that inflation may be slowing down in the months to come.

State of play: Prices are falling for a bunch of key commodities: Oil, lumber, wheat and corn, as the WSJ reported earlier this week.

• Global supply chain pressure also backed off in June because of a decrease in delivery times from China, according to the New York Fed's monthly supply chain index released yesterday.
• Recession jitters are even cooling the mortgage market. The rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage has dropped by half a percentage point to 5.3% over the last two weeks, according to Freddie Mac's data.

Yes, but: Prices for all these things are still very high, compared to where we were before the pandemic. And there's no real indication we're going back to the cheaper pre-pandemic times.

"We see an era of structurally higher commodities prices ahead," the authors of BlackRock's weekly market commentary wrote earlier this week. "Rate hikes...could cause more dips. But we think prices are at structurally higher levels now."

• Energy prices in particular will be high for a while, thanks to the war in Ukraine.
• Also: As demand for renewable power grows, so will the need for metals to build clean energy infrastructure, they say.

What to watch: It takes about three months for the lower producer costs to filter down to consumers — where they should show up in the closely-watched Consumer Price Index, S&P's Williamson says.

Match Group, the company behind the dating apps Tinder and Hinge, confirmed to Axios that it would suspend donations to state attorneys general, after facing charges of hypocrisy for giving money to anti-abortion politicians while at the same time publicly supporting reproductive rights, Emily writes.

Why it matters: Activists are taking the post-Dobbs fight to the business sector, going after corporations for making statements supporting abortion, but also giving money to anti-abortion politicians like the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA).

• The women's rights group UltraViolet is calling the practice "reprowashing" — and along with other progressives is pushing to stop corporations from doing it.

Details: Match CEO Bernard Kim said he only learned of his company's $100,000 donation to RAGA after reading media reports, according to the New York Times which first reported the news.

• RAGA is now a pivotal player in the post-Dobbs push to pass abortion bans at the state level. It was Mississippi AG Lynn Fitch, a RAGA member, who argued in favor of her state's restrictive abortion law in the Dobbs case, overturning the federal right to abortion.

What to watch: Will more companies come forward? So far Match is out there alone.

• "Match is demonstrating what corporate integrity looks like," said Shelley Alpern, director of corporate engagement at Rhia Ventures. "We expect others will be emboldened by its example."

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