Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

HOUSING MARKET LEADING U.S. TOWARD RECESSION, NAHB CHIEF SAYS The weakening U.S. housing market is leading the country into a recession, Jerry Howard, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), said in a recent Bloomberg interview. Residential real estate makes up 15 to 18 percent of the U.S. GDP in a typical year,...

International paint purveyor Sherwin-Williams cut its per-share earnings outlook for 2022 from around $9.50 a share to around $8.65, although it reported higher sales in terms of dollar volumes in its second quarter. The company’s share price dropped as much as 13.2 percent on the news, but later recovered to end down 8.8 percent on...

In June, the value of orders for pricey items designed to last three years, such as refrigerators and factory robots, grew by 1.9 percent to $272.6 billion, the U.S. commerce department reported. However, when defense spending is excluded, June’s gain was 0.4 percent. During the same month, inflation flew at 9.1 percent. Commerce department figures...

Consumer confidence fell in July for the third consecutive month, according to the Conference Board, an international nonprofit consortium of corporations. Consumers’ outlook fell to a rating of 95.7 last month from 98.4 in June and dropped below economists’ expectation of 97.2, freighted with concerns about rising food and fuel prices in particular. Buyers are...

Plunging stock and bond prices have left state and local public pension funds with assets to cover only 77.9 percent of what they will eventually owe, Bloomberg reported. Last year, the funds had 84.8 percent of the money needed to meet their obligations, according to the nonprofit Equable Institute. That translates to almost $500 billion...

Mussolini named it, American has long been doing it: Fascism, is the merger of state and corporate powers. The House of Representatives sent a bill to President Joe Biden’s desk last week that will earmark billions in financial assistance for U.S. companies to create domestic semiconductor facilities to counter China’s growth in the industry.  The...

After a year of negotiations and false starts, Senate Democrats won Joe Manchin’s agreement to a plan to spend $385 billion to speed the U.S. transition toward cleaner fuels and $100 billion to expand subsidies for Medicare drug coverage and for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” for three years. The proposed...

U.S. mortgage rates fell last week after the U.S. Federal Reserve added three-quarters of a point to its key interest rate. The interest on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage dropped from 5.54 percent on Wednesday, the day the Fed raised its rate, to 5.22 on Thursday. It slumped to 5.13 percent on Friday and closed Monday,...

Speculators playing the market in interest rate futures are betting that the U.S. Federal Reserve will continue raising interest rates aggressively through this year, then begin to cut them in the second half of 2023. The underlying assumption is that the Fed will drive the economy into a recession, which it then will seek to...

Members of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee voted unanimously on 27 July to add three-quarters of a point to the key federal funds interest rate. The hike followed the same-size increase the committee made in June, making the successive increases the Fed’s most aggressive policy tightening in 40 years. The rate will now...