Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

Semiconductor giant Intel will invest more than $20 billion to build two new chip-making plants near Columbus, Ohio, the company has announced, with the possible investment growing to $100 billion and eight plants over the next ten years. Separately, the company will spend as much as $100 million with educational institutions in the Columbus area...

What we have long forecast is now clear reality. Equity markets and economies should have been in crash-mode two years ago when psychopathic, power-hungry politicians across the globe locked down economies to fight the COVID War. Think about it! When in the history of the world, has this happened? To illustrate the insanity of their...

BIGS GET BIGGER: THE METAVERSE WORLD  Today, tech giant Microsoft will shovel out $68.7 billion in-cash to gobble up video game giant Activision Blizzard.  Getting bigger and bigger and expanding into the meta and digital world, with a market cap of nearly $3 trillion, Microsoft, paid $7.5 billion for game maker Bethesda, last year, bought...

The U.S. auto market will grow 3.4 percent this year to 15.4 million cars and trucks, the 16,000-member National Automobile Dealers Association said, as the shortage of computer chips continues to impinge on production. The chip shortage reduced dealers’ inventories by 59 percent in December, compared to a year before, and will continue to cut...

In December, sales slipped at 98 percent of U.S. restaurants, according to an Independent Restaurant Coalition (IRC) poll of 1,169 eateries around the country. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said their sales had tanked by half, while 80 percent said that the Omicron surge had shortened their hours of operation. The impact was worst among businesses...

The U.S. Federal Reserve will raise interest rates as many as six or seven times this year to fight inflation, not the three or four that the Fed has signaled, in the view of Jamie Dimon, CEO and executive chair of J.P. Morgan Chase, the U.S.’s biggest bank. “I grew up in a world where...

The U.S. housing market has succumbed to its own excess: December booked 11 percent fewer sales than a year earlier, the lowest number since June 2020, because the number of homes on the market fell 19 percent, year on year, to the lowest on record, according to online brokerage Redfin. The largest declines were in...

U.S. mortgage rates rose last week for the third consecutive week to their highest since March 2020 when the COVID War began, The Wall Street Journal reported. The average rate for a 30-year, fixed-rate loan moved up to 3.45 percent on 13 January, compared to 3.22 percent the week before and 2.79 percent a year...

The expanded child tax credits that were part of president Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan expired 30 December, canceling the $300-per-child monthly stipend that, collectively, put an average of $16 billion a month into the U.S. economy, according to J.P. Morgan. That was more than twice what Americans spend on average each month on electronics...

U.S. retail sales edged down 1.9 percent in December, in tandem with a 0.3-percent decline in industrial production, its first slip since September, attributed to supply-chain problems, according to data from the U.S. Federal Reserve and commerce department released 14 January. Excluding autos, which still are selling briskly, consumer sales fell 2.3 percent, defying Dow...