Editor’s Note: It is amusing, if not tragic, that those who complain the most about “inequality”, pursue monetary, fiscal, and tax policies, that make it much worse for the poor. Asset price inflation favors obviously those with the means to own assets: stocks, bonds, and real estate. While inflation is a tax on all of […]
Even the Fed is getting antsy about this raging mania house-price inflation. Housing Bubble 1 is starting to look cute in comparison. House prices spiked 19.7% from a year ago, the biggest year-over-year increase in the data going back to 1987, according to the National Case-Shiller Home Price Index today. But the national index of this raging […]
The property sector and its debts are possibly the biggest financial mess in China’s history. The crackdowns by Chinese authorities on some of the biggest hype-and-hoopla industries have sent investors heading for the exits. There is a crackdown on debt to keep the financial system from imploding. There’s a crackdown on property speculation to tamp […]
One of the largest central banks ends QE. End of an era for Japan: Large-scale money printing was one of the three official legs of Abenomics. In terms of the absolute mountain of assets the Bank of Japan purchased over the years, it is one of the top three QE monsters, along with the Fed […]
Free money destroyed the pricing mechanism, and demand has soared despite much higher prices. The shortages are not at Costco or Safeway, though they too might run out of a few weird items here and there. But other retailers are complaining about them, including apparel retailers and shoe retailers – yup, it took five weeks […]
“Normalization” or “deceleration,” as this phenomenon is called, is setting in Prices of existing single-family houses, condos, and co-ops dipped in July, reverting to seasonality for the first time since 2019, amid surging price reductions. Single-family house sales dropped 4.1% in July, from a year ago, the first decline since the lockdowns. Condo sales rose. […]
Over-stimulated demand, tangled supply chains: shortages for some, plenty of supply for others. The historic stimulus from $5 trillion in government deficit-spending and from $4 trillion in Fed money-printing within a 16 month period resulted in a historic spike in consumer spending on goods. When the demand shock hit retailers and other companies, they were suddenly […]
Now it’s new vehicles, restaurants, energy. Game of Whac-A-Mole as some price spikes slow while others begin. But it’s a lot worse than it seems. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) jumped 0.5% in July from June, after having jumped 0.9% in June, 0.6% in May, for a three-month annualized rate – the three-month momentum – […]
Raging mania house-price inflation. House prices spiked 16.6% from a year ago, the biggest increase in the data going back to 1987, according to the National Case-Shiller Home Price Index today, which was for the three-month moving average of closed sales entered into public records in March, April, and May. But in some cities, the raging housing […]
Sales edge up, after sagging for months, amid Crazy Spiking Prices Inventories of existing single-family houses, condos, and co-ops rose for the fourth month in a row. Sellers are coming out of the woodwork, and new listings have been rising for months, this being a perfect time to sell a home. Sales ticked up a […]
Defying economists’ expectations for sixth month in a row, inflation heats up instead of easing off. And it’s a lot worse than it seems. The Consumer Price Index jumped 0.9% in June from May, after having jumped 0.6% in May, and 0.8% in April – all of them the steepest month-to-month jumps since 2009, according […]
If these sentiments become reality over time, it’s going to be a sea change for demand and supply at these crazy prices. So just briefly: This explains some of the dynamics we have seen in the housing market recently, with mortgage applications, sales of existing homes, and sales of new single-family houses dropping for months […]
We don’t know how much total leverage there is, but from the trends in margin debt, we know it’s huge and ballooning. A big part of the leverage in the stock market is not tracked and no one knows what it is. Occasionally, a tidbit bubbles to the surface when something blows up, such […]
The Consumer Price Index jumped 0.6% in May, after having jumped 0.8% in April, and 0.6% in March – all three the steepest month-to-month jumps since 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics today. For the three months combined, CPI has jumped by 2.0%, or by an “annualized” pace of 8.1%. This current three-month pace of […]
A sign of how messed up the moving parts of the economy have become, amid massive excesses and distortions connected by malfunctioning gearing. In an interview a few days ago that aired locally, the owner of an Italian restaurant in San Francisco – the restaurant scene is now vibrant in a different way than before […]
This is a world of unprecedented Fed intervention, government stimulus, inflation that has turned red-hot this year amid a weird phenomenon of companies complaining about a labor shortage, while nearly 10 million people are deemed “unemployed” and 16 million people are claiming some sort of unemployment insurance. As 2.1 million mortgages are still in forbearance […]
Consumers are picking up on the rise of inflation, and the Fed, which has been trying to heat up inflation, is pleased. The Fed watches “inflation expectations” carefully. The minutes from the March FOMC meeting mention “inflation expectations” 12 times. The New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations for April, released today, showed that median inflation expectations […]
Even the Fed’s repressed inflation measure without food and energy rose 2.3% annual rate in Q1. The US economy, as measured by inflation-adjusted GDP, grew by 1.6% in the first quarter from Q4 2020, according to the advance estimate of the Bureau of Economic Analysis this morning. If you read in the headline that it grew by […]
Archegos shows how leverage is the great accelerator of stock prices on the way up, and on the way down. One of its bets, ViacomCBS, after skyrocketing, collapsed by 60%. Vast, unreported, and at the time unknown amounts of leverage blew up Archegos Capital Management, dishing out enormous losses to its investors, the banks that brokered […]
And companies have been reporting that they’re able to pass on those surging costs. So here we go with inflation. Inflation that producers are experiencing is now blowing out. The surging input costs and the ability to pass on those higher input costs that have been reported by company executives as part of the services PMIs [Purchase […]
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