Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

Concerns that rising COVID cases and increasing inflation would derail corporate profits are not showing up in the numbers. The U.S. Stock markets rode the roller coaster back up last week, powered by banks’ heady earnings reports to close their best weekly showing in months. Investors also were cheered by September’s 0.7 percent rise in...

About a billion room-nights will be booked in U.S. hotels this year, data service STR reported, a respectable gain from 2020’s 829 million but still well below 2019’s record 1.3 billion. Hidden in those larger numbers is a bit of bad news: business travel continues to decline, a trend we noted early in “Travel Succumbs...

In America, once the Land of Opportunity, renowned for its strong middle class, continues its economic divergence as the rich are getting richer and the rest keep getting poorer. It’s in the numbers.  With U.S. home prices spiking, they are less affordable to Americans than at any time since the Panic of ’08. Now, the...

As the U.S. dollar grows stronger, precious metals prices go lower, since they are dollar based, it costs more to buy them. Thus, prices are slumping as The Wall Street Journal’s Dollar Index reached its highest reading in 13 months last week, having risen steadily since June and 2 percent in September alone, the WSJ...

U.S. investors are paring back investments in hedges—instruments that pay a return when equity markets fall—according to the Financial Times, and taking profits in derivatives that would have protected them from a market slump. This signals investors’ belief that the worst of the markets’ recent tumble is over, the FT said. Cboe’s Skew Index, which...

Remember the Trade War during the Trump administration. Remember how we kept reporting what bullshit it was when the business media Presstitutes kept peddling the crap that nearly every time the markets fell or rose it was related to the “trade war” between the U.S. and China. And, remember how we said that there was...

October started off with a market bang, as U.S. equities posted their biggest weekly gains since June. The word on The Street is that with expectation of the Delta variant waning and the piling on of more government debt following the U.S. Senate’s stopgap deal to avoid a government default… that happy economic days are...

All 40,000 U.S. employees of International accounting and business services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) who work in client services are free from now on to work at home and live wherever they please, the firm has announced. The catch: those workers need to be available to come to a central office three days a month, at...

President Joe Biden has decried the current tax structure that enables 55 of America’s richest and most successful companies to pay no income tax and has promised that his tax reform plan, now working its way through Congress, will plug that hole. The list of so-called “zero tax” companies, compiled by the Institute on Taxation...

August’s continuing boom in home construction offset the continuing decline in other sectors of the building industry, leaving construction spending flat for the month. “Nearly every nonresidential spending segment has deteriorated from already inadequate 2020 levels during the first two-third of this year,” Ken Simonson, chief economist for the Associated General Contractors of America (AGCA),...