Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

Empty office space across Manhattan reached a record 18.7 percent as of 1 July, according to Newmark, a real estate services company, with downtown’s office towers standing 21 percent vacant. The vacancy rate is 15 percent higher than at the end of the 2020 and more than double that of February 2020, just before the...

“I’m not predicting we’ll necessarily have a bust” in the housing market, Eric Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, emphasized in an interview with the Financial Times published 29 June. “But it’s worth paying close attention to what’s happening in the housing market,” he added. Housing prices rose 23.6 percent in May,...

Spending on commercial construction slipped 1.1 percent during May, while spending on residential construction gained 0.2 percent, the Associated General Contractors of America (AGCA) reported. Construction for the power industry, which is the largest category in private nonresidential construction, retreated 1.6 percent for the month, the AGCA said; retail, warehouse, and farm building was off...

As corporations settle into a new normal of employees working partly or entirely at home, new businesses have sprung up to offer efficient designs for flexible office space, telecom software to connect team members, and other tools to make seamless connections among home-based and central-office workers. In 2020, companies spend $317 billion on technology to...

The U.S. trade deficit expanded 3.1 percent in May from the month before, totaling $71.2 billion, the U.S. commerce department reported. The country imported 1.3 percent more, totaling $277.3 billion, and exported just 0.6 percent more, worth $206 billion. The U.S. brought in more crude oil, lumber, and other industrial raw materials, and also more...

The U.S. Federal Reserve will need to raise interest rates no later than late 2022 or early 2023 as more government spending pushes inflation’s rate beyond the Fed’s 2-percent target, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in a 1 July statement. Early in 2022, the Fed is likely to begin to scale back its $120-billion...

Continued federal economic stimulus could drive inflation faster, requiring the U.S. Federal Reserve to raise interest rates sooner than it now plans to, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned in a 7 July public statement. Higher U.S. interest rates could pressure other countries to increase theirs. The resulting higher yields on government bonds could suck...

A 10 July Financial Times article quotes from an interview the paper conducted with Mary Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, agrees with what we have long forecasted. Ms. Daly warns that the world’s economic recovery from the ravages of the COVID War may not be as rosy as first thought....

The U.S. economic recovery has been brisk, but “shortages of material inputs and difficulty in hiring have held down activity in a number of industries,” the U.S. Federal Reserve said in its 9 July Monetary Policy Report. The report indicates that the Fed might be changing its view of its current strategy to right the...

After setting a record 64 in May, the Supply Management Institute’s index measuring the performance of the economy’s service sector fell back to 60.1 in June, the lowest mark since February, as service firms grappled with supply shortages and struggled to hire enough workers.  Economists contacted by the Financial Times expected the rating to dip...