Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

On 22 October, a measure of investors’ outlook for inflation notched its worst mark since 2012. The 10-year breakeven rate gauges what investors think a rate of return would have to be to match inflation over the next decade. Last week, the rate rose to 2.64, according to Federal Reserve Economic Data. The breakeven rate...

For several weeks we have been noting that while the Feds and Wall Street keep blabbing that supply chain disruptions are fueling inflation, they have been ignoring the #1 inflation spiker: government and central banks flooding the economy with cheap money. Now they are starting to admit the truth in trends. President Joe Biden’s $1.9-trillion...

U.S. INDEXES KEEP SETTING NEW RECORD The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed last week at 35,677, another record high, with the NASDAQ adding 1.3 percent and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index up 1.6 percent for the week.  Price gains were driven by strong earnings reports by banks, manufactures, consumer sectors and a variety of...

Hotels in and around Orlando, Fla., will see 2021 revenues from business travelers 81.5 percent below 2019’s, a loss of $2.27 billion and 44,000 jobs, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA). Miami’s lodging industry will be down 62.6 percent in business travel, with revenue from that customer base falling $830 million from...

Go back to 2020.  Remember the bullshit line after politicians lockdown the nation?  “It’ll come back.” Remember the bullshit line that they were locking down the nation to “Flatten the curve”? No curve was flattened and the lockdowns continued. Yet, throughout 2020, the word was that after Labor Day, people who had been locked up...

Seventy-eight percent of community bank executives believe the U.S. housing market will crash at some point in the next four years, according to a survey published last Wednesday by software firm MANTL and Wakefield Research. Home prices have risen 18.1 percent in the 12 months ending 31 August, according to data service Corelogic, the fastest...

What has been called the “Great Resignation” became greater in August, with 4.3 million Americans, about 2.9 percent of the entire workforce, quitting their jobs during the month, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That number tops the 2.7 percent that quit in July and sets a record for the monthly “quit...

Goldman Sachs has cut its 2021 forecast for U.S. economic growth from 5.7 percent to 5.6 and trimmed its 2022 outlook from a 4.4-percent GDP expansion to a flat 4 percent. The economy will suffer as the U.S. Federal Reserve gradually ends its $120-billion monthly bond-buying program, in place since March 2020, with the ongoing...

New claims for unemployment benefits fell for the second consecutive week, this time to 293,000, the first time they have slid below 300,000 since March 2020 and approaching the 225,000 weekly average that prevailed before the COVID virus took hold. The new number beat the 319,000 average predicted by economists Bloomberg had surveyed. Continuing claims...

U.S. equity markets keep rising this year, but prices have been gyrating more and more quickly in recent trading as investors have been spooked by September’s abysmal jobs report, relentlessly rising prices, and shortages of key goods that could last for months. But those worries of hard facts and solid data are soon forgotten as...