Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

The number of U.S. mortgage applications shrank by 6.5 percent during the week ending 3 June, falling for the fourth consecutive week and reaching the smallest volume since 2002, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) said. Applications for new purchases fell 6 percent for the week; applications to refinance were down 7 percent. Interest rates have...

In April, 17.8 percent fewer U.S. luxury homes—defined as the most expensive 5 percent of houses in a given market area—were sold during the three months ending on 30 April, compared to the same period in 2021, the online brokerage Redfin.com reported, the largest monthly decline since the onset of the COVID War in March...

Investment management firm Bridgewater Associates is placing bets that the U.S. and European corporate bond markets will experience a sell-off later this year, according to the Financial Times. The “short” positions illustrate Bridgewater’s view that “we’re in a radically different world” from the one in which the U.S. Federal Reserve subsidized investments with rock-bottom interest...

Hedge funds focusing on stocks hold about $1.2 trillion in assets and are looking at what may be their “worst year on record,” the Financial Times said, with the typical fund losing 8 percent this year through May, according to data service HFR. The scale of loss dwarfs that in the first five months of...

The Standard & Poor’s 500 information technology sector had lost 22 percent of its value this year, its worst stretch over that period of time in any year since 2002… when the U.S. was in slow recovery from the dot com bust.  The six-percent spread between the tech sector and the broad index is the...

The U.S. Federal Reserve has signaled that it will raise its key interest rate by a half-point when its Open Market Committee meets this week. That was the word on Wall Street before last Friday’s inflation numbers hit Main Street. As we have noted.  With May’s unrelenting 8.6-percent inflation rate, a 40-year high, a growing...

2020 was the year the world changed. Never before in the History of the World Part 1 or Part 2, had nations across the planet locked down. Without a scintilla of scientific evidence, political science was imposed by politicians in cities, states and nations—along with nobody bureaucrats labeled “health experts”—who issued draconian mandates.  Among them,...

Last week in an interview with Wolf (Puppy Dog) Bllitzer on the Cartoon News Network (CNN), former Fed Head and current U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Blitzer, “I think I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take,” after he played clips of her saying back in 2021 that inflation posed a...

Avian flu, which already has killed 40 million turkeys in the U.S., has thinned flocks that Hormel Foods relies on for its Jennie-O turkey products. As a result, Jennie-O sales will fall as much as 30 percent in the second half of this year, the company said, because it will be unable to get enough...

Retailers laid off workers in May as hotels, restaurants, and other seasonal services staffed up for the summer months. In addition to newly penny-pinching consumers, many retailers have too much inventory on hand. Stores placed orders in past months to meet consumer demand but were unable to get enough stock because of materials shortages at...