Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

The number of diners visiting casual sit-down restaurants such as Applebee’s and Olive Garden was 3 percent less in the three months ending 12 June than in the same period the year before, restaurant research service Black Box Intelligence reported. Although the dollar value of sales rose 4.4 percent during the year, inflation accounts for...

The average interest rate for a 30-year, fixed rate mortgage loan settled back to 5.70 percent during the week ending 30 June, down from 5.81 percent the week before, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. reported. The rate still is approaching twice the 3.22 percent where rates began this year and remain close to its...

U.S. pension funds are falling far short of the money they need to meet the payments they will owe to America’s retirees, The Wall Street Journal reported. To make up the difference, the funds are investing with money they have borrowed. Pension funds issued almost $13 billion in bonded debt in 2021, more than in...

Yields on U.S. treasury securities have been rising with interest rates and the federal government’s debt service payments are rising with them. The return on the benchmark 10-year treasury note will average 2.4 percent this fiscal year, compared to 1.4 percent in the previous year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has predicted. During the...

Consumer spending increased 1.8 percent in this year’s first quarter, year over year, according to the U.S. commerce department, dramatically lower than the 3.1-percent increase the department had estimated previously. Adjusted for inflation, the gain was only 0.5 percent during the period, slipping a fraction from 0.6 percent in 2021’s final quarter. Spending on services...

U.S. consumer spending rose just 0.2 percent in June, year over year, the slowest pace this year, a third of May’s 0.6-percent gain, and half of the 0.4-percent growth analysts had expected. The news follows the commerce department’s revised estimate that first-quarter consumer spending grew just 1.8 percent from the same period in 2021, not...

As U.S. stock markets booked their worst first half of a year since 1970, investors lost more than $9 trillion, Bloomberg has calculated from S&P data tracking small, medium, and large publicly-traded companies. The NASDAQ had shrunk by nearly a third this year as of 30 June, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 index losing...

With mortgage interest rates rising and home prices remaining at record highs amid a persistent shortage of houses for sale, more prospective buyers are becoming renters of single-family homes. The median sale price of existing homes edged up to $407,600 in May, another record, according to the National Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, the average interest...

It’s here, it’s alive but still not “official” until the “official Bankster bandits” who officially dismissed spiking inflation as “temporary” and then “transitory” make it “official.”  The Recession that we had forecast is sweeping the globe. In the first quarter of this year, America’s Gross Domestic Product contracted by -1.6 percent. In the world of...