Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

The median price of a single-family home in the U.S. reached a record $350,000 in May, rising from the previous record of $341,600, set the month before, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported. Prices have increased 24 percent in the last 12 months, the fastest year-on-year gain since 1999 when the NAR began keeping...

U.S. government spending is about to collide with the Congressionally-mandated limit on the national debt and the treasury will no longer be able to pay the country’s bills some time in August unless legislators raise the limit before their August recess, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin warned in testimony before Congress on 23 June. Because lingering...

Officials of the U.S. Federal Reserve aired their differing views last week about when the Fed should raise interest rates or cut back its $120-billion-a-month bond-buying program. The U.S. Federal Reserve will need to raise interest rates late in 2022, not in 2023 as bank officials determined at their meeting earlier this month, Raphael Bostic,...

The U.S. economic recovery has peaked and, beginning in July, will moderate as shortages and inflation curb consumer spending, Bank of America (BOA) said in an 18 June research note. The GDP expanded 11 percent in this year’s second quarter, will grow by 9 percent in the third quarter, and 5 percent in the fourth,...

In May, the Core Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index, which the U.S. Federal Reserve views as the most reliable gauge of inflation, shot up 3.4 percent compared to a year earlier, the U.S. commerce department reported.  This represents the biggest 12-month increase since April 1992, according to CNBC. Separately, the department reported that also in...

Consumer spending on goods in May rose 20 percent from February 2020’s amount, with spending on services only 1 percent below pre-shutdown levels.  With inflation on the rise, overall spending maintained April’s volume, when consumers paid 0.9 percent more for goods and services than in March. Spending on recreation grew 3.5 percent last month, the...

Once upon a time – before American politicians stole the people’s money to enrich the military industrial complex and sent its young men to fight and die in endless wars, and killed its manufacturing sector by outsourcing its production to those “dirty commie countries” – America was the unrivaled “Land of Opportunity.” Those days are...

Investors will learn “a pretty expensive lesson” when they see that some companies that have gone public through special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) played “fast and loose with their projections” to “create castles in the sky,” James Chanos, founder of hedge fund Kynikos Associates, said in a statement quoted by the Financial Times. Chanos, known as...

EQUITY MARKETS RECORD-SETTING RALLY On 25 June, U.S. stock markets closed their best week since February, reversing the previous week’s plunge that marked their worst five-day span in eight months and giving the S&P 500 index new record closes on Thursday and Friday. The S&P ended the week at 4,280.70, gaining 2.7 percent over the...

JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank in terms of assets, will buy Nutmeg Savings and Investment, a British online bank, for a price said by insiders to be about $1 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported. Nutmeg, founded in 2012, has 140,000 customers and €3.5 billion, or about $5 billion, under management. JPMorgan plans to...