Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

As we have noted, the U.S. Federal Reserve has called current pressures inflating prices for everything from milk to manganese “transitory.”  Now Costco CFO Richard Galanti has put a tentative timeline to that in a late May earnings call reported by Yahoo Finance. These pressures “will continue for the most part of this calendar year,”...

Activity in the U.S. services economy in May was stronger than at any time on record, according to the Institute for Supply Management (ISM). The ISM’s services activity index rose from 62.7 in April to 64.0 last month, its highest level ever, the ISM said.  Any rating above 50 indicates expansion; the higher the number,...

The U.S. Federal Reserve soon will begin to sell the almost $14 billion in corporate bonds and exchange-traded funds it bought to prop up the economy during the economic crisis, the central bank has announced. The sales will be made by the Fed’s Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF), an emergency vehicle that bought about...

“We’ve never had anything like it,” Allen Sinai, chief economist and strategist at Decision Economics, told the Wall Street Journal. “A collapse and then a boom-like pick-up… is without historical parallel.” Several factors back Sinai’s claim, the WSJ noted in a 3 June analysis: This year through May, 830,000 new businesses were formed that intend...

U.S. employers hired 559,000 workers in May, almost double April’s revised number of 278,000, the U.S. Labor Department reported. The gains fell short of economists’ median estimate that the economy would deliver 674,000 jobs last month, according to Business Insider. In a 1 June speech to the New York Economic Club, Fed governor Lael Brainard...

Almost 260 special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) have amassed $87 billion they must invest by a deadline that is becoming harder to meet, according to data firm SPAC Research. A SPAC or “blank-check company” is a special category of company that goes public, typically at $10 a share, even though it has no assets. When it...

U.S. equities markets closed last week on the rise after May’s jobs report showed respectable gains in employment but was modest enough to give investors some confidence that the U.S. Federal Reserve will not change its easy-money policies in the near future. Tech stocks lifted the S&P 500 index 0.9 percent on Friday, boosting it...

Amazon has agreed to buy the MGM movie studio for $6.5 billion in equity and $1.95 billion in debt, Amazon has announced. The deal is Amazon’s second-largest acquisition, the Wall Street Journal reported; the company paid $13.7 billion in 2017 to buy Whole Foods Market, Inc. The purchase will bring vast new content to Amazon’s...

As the price of single-family homes leaves more and more prospective buyers behind, the record price of lumber is raising costs and, therefore, rental rates for new flats. Many apartment blocks are made of metal and concrete, but wood still figures prominently in cabinets, trim, flooring, and some structural components. The cost of building materials,...

Rental rates in March for single-family homes in the U.S. reached their highest since September 2006, when the housing market crashed at the outset of the Great Recession, data firm CoreLogic reported in a study released 25 May. Average rents climbed 4.3 percent year on year in March, the company said. Rates are steadily rising...