Americans added $266 billion to their debts in this year’s first quarter, with credit card balances rising and mortgage debt climbing, bringing total household debt to $15.84 trillion, according to 10 May data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That total debt is $1.7 trillion higher than the last quarter of 2019, just...
Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT
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INFLATION AT WHOLESALE LEVEL HIT 11 PERCENT IN APRIL
The U.S. Producer Price Index, which tracks the prices that manufacturers charge for the products leaving their factories, grew to 11 percent in April, year over year, slightly slower than the 11.5 percent notched in March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Month over month, gasoline prices were up 1.7 percent and groceries gained 1.5...
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CONSUMER INFLATION KEEPS SPIKING
The big news from the Presstitute media and Washington was that the pace of U.S. inflation slowed in April for the first time since August 2021, with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) easing from an annual rate of 8.5 percent in March to 8.3 percent last month. The grand celebration was that it was .2...
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FED HEAD WARNS OF “PAIN” IN THE FIGHT AGAINST INFLATION
Hauling inflation down to the U.S. Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2 percent will bring “some pain” to the nation’s economy and consumers and may depend on factors the Fed is unable to control, Fed chair Jerome Powell said last week. “It probably would have been better for us to have raised rates a little...
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NEW WORLD DISORDER TREND: EMERGING NATIONS’ CURRENCIES TAKE A BEATING
The currencies of emerging nations, including China, have fallen the most this year since spring 2020 when the COVID War began, the Financial Times reported. Rising U.S. interest rates are luring capital away from riskier markets and back to the safety of the dollar. At the same time, China’s protracted lockdown is scuttling markets for...
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JAPAN’S YEN STRATEGY FLOPS
For years, Japan’s central bank has kept interest rates low—currently -0.1 percent—to spur the domestic economy and keep the yen weak to make Japanese goods cheaper abroad. Whatever benefits that strategy brought in the past, it is failing now. Despite massive government stimulus, the economy has remained weak and worker pay has stagnated. While U.S....
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FED SHOULD RAISE KEY RATE A FULL POINT BY AUGUST, MESTER SAYS
The U.S. Federal Reserve should raise its benchmark federal funds interest rate by a half-point in June and again in July, Loretta Mester, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, urged in a 13 May speech. “Given economic conditions, ongoing increases in the fed funds rate are called for,” she said. Mester is a...
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GOLDMAN BACKS OUT OF SPACs
Goldman Sachs Group is ending its relationship with most of the special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) it helped to take public over the past two years, people familiar told Bloomberg. The company—the second largest underwriter of SPACs since 2020—is worried about its liability for SPACs’ performance under new regulatory guidelines. A SPAC or “blank-check company” is...
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INVESTORS STAGE MASSIVE SELL-OFF OF EUROPE’S CORPORATE BONDS
Investors in Europe’s corporate bonds dumped their holdings at a record pace last week as fears of an economy crumbling under rampant inflation and sliding into recession took hold of the market. Much of the worry stems from indications that the European Central Bank will raise interest rates in July, denting the economy, the Financial...
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STOCKS HAVE CRASHED. THEY’RE STILL TOO EXPENSIVE
U.S. equities have made their worst start to a year in a half-century, Wall Street Journal analyst Karen Angley noted in a 13 May commentary. They still might be overpriced, she wrote. On 12 May, far into the stock market’s rout, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index was still trading 16.8 times its listed companies’...