Following the midterm elections in the U.S. in November of 2022, we had forecast that the U.S. equity markets would spike in 2023. They did. The rally led all three U.S. stock indexes to a stellar year, concluding with nine consecutive weekly gains, the longest such streak in almost two decades.
Across the U.S., 5.2 percent of warehouse space stood empty in last year’s fourth quarter, up from 4.6 percent in the third and 3.1 percent in 2022’s final three months, real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield reported.
Choked supply chains during the COVID War cut the number of items that manufacturers could make. Product lines in everything from bed sheets to cat food narrowed. Now that the COVID era has largely passed and supply lines have re-established themselves, those missing items are not coming back, The Wall Street Journal reported.
In November, builders began work on new homes at a clip that translates to an annual rate of 1.6 million housing units and filed permits to construct 1.5 million more, news service Quartz reported.
The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and U.S. Chips and Science Act have dedicated funding to high-tech and clean energy investments. As a result, factories are being built in selected areas of the country at a pace not seen in decades.
Twenty-four percent of U.S. adults who rent their homes say they can no longer comfortably afford to pay their rent, according to a survey of 1,249 individuals by Intuit Credit Karma.
Last year, U.S. companies planned or carried out layoffs targeting 721,677 jobs, 98 percent more than in 2022 and the most since 2020, outplacement service Challenger, Gray & Christmas (CGC) said in a report released last week.
In 2023, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) slowed by 18 percent, year on year, to $3 trillion worth, a pace not seen since 2013, thanks to inflation, rising interest rates, and fears of a recession, data service Dealogic reported.
Venture capitalists’ (VCs’) attempts to raise funds to invest in new and young companies brought in only $67 billion last year, the least since 2017 and 60 percent less than in 2022, which was a peak year, according to the National Venture Capital Association.
We got it right, we got it wrong. In November 2022, we had forecast the S&P 500 would boom in 2023, going up at least 16 percent. It did, spiking up 24.2 percent for the year.