Tag Archives: US EConomics

New home sales increasing trend continues – for now; expect a major pullback in coming months With mortgage rates having risen sharply (as of this morning Mortgage News Daily has the 30-year rate up to 4.19%, the highest in nearly three years), we are at an important moment for the housing market. In that context, let’s look at this morning’s new home sales report for January. There are two important things to know about new home sales: (1) it...

New 50+ year low in continuing jobless claims [Programming note: I will post about new home sales later this morning.]Initial claims (blue) declined 17,000 to 232,000 (vs. the pandemic low of 188,000 on December 4). The 4 week average (red) declined 7,250 to 236,250 (vs. the pandemic low of 199,750 on December 25). Continuing claims (gold, right scale) declined 112,000 to 1,476,000 (not just a new pandemic low, but the lowest number in over 50...

House price increases still strong, but clear deceleration from peak The Case Shiller and FHFA house price indexes were reporting this morning, covering the period through December. As you all know well, my mantra is that interest rates lead sales, and sales in turn lead prices. Here’s this month’s update. The monthly increase in the Case Shiller national index (violet) was 0.92%, and the YoY% increase was 18.3%. This is the 4th month of...

You’re reading the right blog, Presidents‘ Day edition No economic data today due to the Presidents’ Day holiday, so here is something else I ran across over the weekend. Former Federal Reserve Economist Joseph Gagnon critiqued a Paul Krugman column about the cause of inflation. He notes that the causes of this inflation are both supply and demand sided: To which Paul Krugman replied:Yours truly bought into supply chain problems as creating...

RJS, MarketWatch 666, Producer Prices Rose 1.0% in January, but Annual Increases are Off the Record Highs The seasonally adjusted Producer Price Index (PPI) for final demand rose 1.0% in January, as average prices for finished wholesale goods rose 1.3% while final demand for services rose 0.7% . . . that increase followed a revised 0.4% increase in December, when average prices for finished wholesale goods fell 0.1%, while margins of final...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for February 14 – 18 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. As the Omicron tsunami recedes, what is still present is high commodity prices (not least of which is gasoline), and mortgage rates at levels that have not been seen in close to 3 years. The overall picture is of an economy that is very slowly decelerating, or worsening, depending on whether you feel...

A housing warning: affordability, at long last, is approaching its housing bubble nadir If current price and mortgage trends hold, we are about 6 to 12 months away from matching the very worst housing affordability at the peak of the housing bubble. Let’s start with a comparison of existing home sales (blue, reported today for January), new home sales (gray), and mortgage rates for the past 16 months:  Note that the NAR doesn’t permit...

by Joseph Joyce Risk and FDI While FDI flows recovered in 2021 from the previous year’s decline, not all countries benefitted from the increase. UNCTAD reported that almost three-quarters of global FDI flows in 2021 occurred in advanced economies, and China and other Asian economies recorded the largest increases amongst the emerging markets and developing economies. Multinational companies are evaluating the course of the pandemic in those...

Housing permits jump; the last hurrah before mortgage rates bite? This morning’s report on January housing permits and starts highlighted the unique divergence between the two. As I have often pointed out, permits are the more leading and less noisy of the two reports, so I usually highlight them, especially single family permits. But in the past year there has been a marked divergence in trend between the two data sets, as permits soared then...

Herbert Marcuse and Planned Obsolescence “Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence, and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old fashioned, out of date, obsolete. Planned obsolescence is the desire to own something a little newer and a little better a little sooner than...