Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT – Jan 31 2023

In December, pending home sales increased 2.9 percent from November, the first month-over-month gain since October 2021, according to online brokerage Redfin.

The federal government, Washington’s chief employer, continues to allow a large share of its workforce to toil at home, crimping the city’s office market, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Pre-COVID, corporate travelers accounted for 75 percent of the hotel industry’s profits.

Those national and international road warriors are returning but slowly, with major corporations’ jaunts in 2022 reaching 61 percent of their 2019 levels, according to American Express.

In December, the number of borrowers with shaky credit who were at least 60 days late in making their car payments rose to 5.67 percent, the most since the Great Recession and more than double the 2.68 percent in April 2021, which was the smallest proportion in seven years, Fitch Ratings reported.

Layoffs are infecting other industries after tech sector employers, including Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce already have chopped hundreds of thousands of workers off their payrolls. 

Racking up the biggest drop in temp labor since early 2021, U.S. employers jettisoned 110,800 temporary workers from August through December last year. And with the failure of the holiday shopping splurge, 35,000 temp workers were cut from the market in December alone.

U.S. consumers spent 0.2 percent less in December than in November, even as the holidays were under way, the commerce department reported. Adjusted for inflation, the drop was 0.3 percent.

The U.S. economy grew by 2.9 percent in 2022’s final quarter, year on year, more than the 2.6 percent predicted by economists but less than the third quarter’s 3.2-percent expansion, showing the economy losing momentum. 

In the four weeks ending 26 January, the world’s money market funds took in $135 billion in new cash, the biggest haul since May 2020 when the funds bagged $175 billion as investors fled stocks and bonds when the COVID War set in, data service EFPR reported.