Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT – Jan 10 2023

OpenAI, the private company that developed ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence that converses in natural language, is seeking to raise capital in deals that would value the company at $30 billion, the Financial Times reported.

U.S. companies leased 132 million square feet of warehouse space in 2022’s final quarter, 28.2 percent less than in the third quarter, real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield reported.

Last year, the U.S. auto industry sold 13.7 million vehicles, 8 percent fewer than in 2021 and the fewest since 2011 during the Great Recession, data firm Wards Intelligence shows.

In 2022, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service focused its audits on low-income individuals, according to IRS data analyzed by Syracuse University’s Transactional Access Records Clearinghouse (TRAC).

For the first time since November 2020, the rate of growth in home prices fell into single digits in October, slowing to 9.2 percent from a 10.7-percent pace in September, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case Shiller U.S. home price index.

The U.S. economy filled 233,000 more jobs last month, dropping the unemployment rate from 3.6 percent to a 53-year low of 3.5 percent.

The U.S. middle class lost 2.9 percent of its purchasing power in 2021, while lower-income households saw theirs rise 1.5 percent, according to a study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).