Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

The number of new claims for unemployment benefits fell to 385,000 in the most recent week tallied by the U.S. labor department, a 15-month low and the second consecutive total below 400,000.   Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had forecast a median of 387,000. The firming job market is due to the succeeding vaccination campaign, lifting of...

U.S. pension funds shifted $90 billion from stocks to fixed income investments during the first quarter of this year, putting $41 billion in U.S. treasury bonds, Bank of America reported. A 26 May auction of five-year T-bonds drew more bids from foreign investors than any such auction since last August, the Wall Street Journal said....

S&P 500 SET ANOTHER RECORD The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index closed at 4,247.44 on 11 June, ending its third consecutive week of gains with a new record high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added less than 0.1 percent, edging down slightly for the week; the NASDAQ grew 0.4 percent. The Stoxx Europe 600...

Almost two million travelers passed through U.S. airport security gates on 28 May, the start of the Memorial Day weekend, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration reported, the largest one-day total since March 2020. In all, 7.1 million people flew U.S. routes that weekend, more than five times the number a year earlier but well below...

In May, for the 12th consecutive month, the amount of Manhattan office space available to lease has edged up and now stands at 17 percent of the island’s total office square footage, Bloomberg reported. At the same time, new leases signed increased by 8 percent and rents bumped up to $73.26 per square foot, a...

New York equity firm Elliot Management Corp., with $40 billion under management, has bought a significant number of shares of cloud-based Dropbox and told Dropbox that Eliot is now its second-largest shareholder after Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, insiders told the Wall Street Journal. If true, that would mean Elliot now owns more than 10 percent...

Fundrise, a new fund that has just secured $300 million in credit from Goldman Sachs, is putting investors with as little as $500 to spend into the real estate business. The overheated, overpriced housing market is shutting out more and more buyers who want to live in single-family homes with yards, especially now that more...

U.S. homeowners took $49.6 billion in equity from their homes during the first quarter of this year, according to data from the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation reported by the Wall Street Journal. The total cashed out was the most since 2007, but short of the $84 billion owners extracted from their homes in 2006,...

Many U.S. homeowners could sell their houses at a hefty profit but are unwilling to do so if it means entering the frenzied housing market, engaging in bidding wars, and paying top dollar for a new home, the Wall Street Journal reported. As a result, people are living in their current homes longer than usual,...

The average price of used cars and trucks in the U.S. leaped 10 percent from March to April and is up 21 percent over the past 12 months, according to the Financial Times. This has become a central engine of the country’s accelerating pace of inflation. “Prices are unquestionably higher than they’ve ever been and...