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Sales edge up, after sagging for months, amid Crazy Spiking Prices Inventories of existing single-family houses, condos, and co-ops rose for the fourth month in a row. Sellers are coming out of the woodwork, and new listings have been rising for months, this being a perfect time to sell a home. Sales ticked up a […]
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Defying economists’ expectations for sixth month in a row, inflation heats up instead of easing off. And it’s a lot worse than it seems. The Consumer Price Index jumped 0.9% in June from May, after having jumped 0.6% in May, and 0.8% in April – all of them the steepest month-to-month jumps since 2009, according […]
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If these sentiments become reality over time, it’s going to be a sea change for demand and supply at these crazy prices. So just briefly: This explains some of the dynamics we have seen in the housing market recently, with mortgage applications, sales of existing homes, and sales of new single-family houses dropping for months […]
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We don’t know how much total leverage there is, but from the trends in margin debt, we know it’s huge and ballooning. A big part of the leverage in the stock market is not tracked and no one knows what it is. Occasionally, a tidbit bubbles to the surface when something blows up, such […]
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The Consumer Price Index jumped 0.6% in May, after having jumped 0.8% in April, and 0.6% in March – all three the steepest month-to-month jumps since 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics today. For the three months combined, CPI has jumped by 2.0%, or by an “annualized” pace of 8.1%. This current three-month pace of […]
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A sign of how messed up the moving parts of the economy have become, amid massive excesses and distortions connected by malfunctioning gearing. In an interview a few days ago that aired locally, the owner of an Italian restaurant in San Francisco – the restaurant scene is now vibrant in a different way than before […]
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This is a world of unprecedented Fed intervention, government stimulus, inflation that has turned red-hot this year amid a weird phenomenon of companies complaining about a labor shortage, while nearly 10 million people are deemed “unemployed” and 16 million people are claiming some sort of unemployment insurance. As 2.1 million mortgages are still in forbearance […]
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Consumers are picking up on the rise of inflation, and the Fed, which has been trying to heat up inflation, is pleased. The Fed watches “inflation expectations” carefully. The minutes from the March FOMC meeting mention “inflation expectations” 12 times. The New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations for April, released today, showed that median inflation expectations […]
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Even the Fed’s repressed inflation measure without food and energy rose 2.3% annual rate in Q1. The US economy, as measured by inflation-adjusted GDP, grew by 1.6% in the first quarter from Q4 2020, according to the advance estimate of the Bureau of Economic Analysis this morning. If you read in the headline that it grew by […]
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Archegos shows how leverage is the great accelerator of stock prices on the way up, and on the way down. One of its bets, ViacomCBS, after skyrocketing, collapsed by 60%. Vast, unreported, and at the time unknown amounts of leverage blew up Archegos Capital Management, dishing out enormous losses to its investors, the banks that brokered […]
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And companies have been reporting that they’re able to pass on those surging costs. So here we go with inflation. Inflation that producers are experiencing is now blowing out. The surging input costs and the ability to pass on those higher input costs that have been reported by company executives as part of the services PMIs [Purchase […]
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Dollar’s Purchasing Power Swoons, but CPI ignores house price inflation. House prices rose by 11.2% from a year ago, the biggest increase since the peak of Housing Bubble 1 in 2006, according to today’s National Case-Shiller Home Price Index for January. The index is a good measure of “house-price inflation” because it’s based on the “sales pairs” […]
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Everything is on ice. But when forbearance ends, forced sellers or lenders will put millions of these homes on the market. On the other side of the red-hot housing market, a historic delinquency problem has been fermenting since last spring, largely put on ice and on hold by forbearance programs, waiting to be dealt with. […]
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So now we have another gutting, this time at the HuffPost, and omertà reigns. This kind of thing – news publications with lots of traffic gutting their staff because they’ve been losing tons of money – has been happening for years, and these publishers and the media outlets that report on it are under some […]
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Editor’s Note: Many argue that current stock market action is discounting a huge post-pandemic surge in spending. This report casts doubt on this assumption. Free money whipped consumers into a rollicking eight-month splurge on goods. There’s nothing “pent up.” And services are not a shoo-in for “pent-up demand.” Give Americans some free money, and tell […]
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Spiking prices for new and used vehicles under the microscope. The “Purchasing Power of the Consumer Dollar” – part of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index data released today – is the politically incorrect mirror image of inflation in consumer prices, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI). By wanting to increase consumer […]
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There is still the theme that some of it is just temporary. Big parts of the services sector – such as restaurants, entertainment, lodging, and travel – have been hit hard during this crisis. Other parts of the services industries – such as real estate, services related to eCommerce, transportation services, video games, streaming services, […]