U.S. automobile and real estate sales decline despite higher consumer confidence and low unemployment as of October 2018.

Fiona Sydney

2018-10-27 09:34:00 Sat ET

U.S. automobile and real estate sales decline despite higher consumer confidence and low unemployment as of October 2018. This slowdown arises from the current U.S. interest rate hike that helps wean the economy off near-zero rates. High costs of capital squeeze the automobile and real estate industries after the prior decade of monetary stimulus. The most expensive U.S. consumer purchases are cars and houses, and these consumer industries are quite sensitive to the cyclical ebbs and flows of credit supply expansion. Recent U.S. mortgage rates reach 5% for the first time since 2011, and thus new home sales tumble 5.5% in 2018Q3 to the lowest level in about 2 years.

Residential home sale declines are double-digits and quite severe in the northeast and west U.S. states. In light of higher mortgage rates and home prices, financial economists start to consider rental properties more cost-effective than residential home purchases. Meanwhile, most Case-Shiller home price indices begin to show the current trend that home price gains decelerate from March 2018 to September 2018. Wall Street seems to impose hefty penalties on automobile and real estate stocks. Many homebuilder ETFs such as XHB, TOL, and KBH have plunged about 30% year-to-date since January 2018. Also, several automobile stocks from Ford to GM show 25%+ price declines in the same time frame. The latter auto industry further suffers higher production costs due to Trump tariffs. These bearish traces suggest the inconvenient truth that the U.S. economy may have gone beyond the peak of real business cycles with low inflation and robust employment and capital investment growth.

 


If any of our AYA Analytica financial health memos (FHM), blog posts, ebooks, newsletters, and notifications etc, or any other form of online content curation, involves potential copyright concerns, please feel free to contact us at service@ayafintech.network so that we can remove relevant content in response to any such request within a reasonable time frame.

Blog+More

We can decipher valuable lessons from the annual letters to shareholders written by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Becky Berkman

2019-07-19 18:40:00 Friday ET

We can decipher valuable lessons from the annual letters to shareholders written by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

We can decipher valuable lessons from the annual letters to shareholders written by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Amazon is highly customer-centric because the wor

+See More

Warren Buffett points out that American children will be better off than their parents in the next decades.

Dan Rochefort

2018-01-05 07:37:00 Friday ET

Warren Buffett points out that American children will be better off than their parents in the next decades.

Warren Buffett cleverly points out that American children will not only be better off than their parents, but the former will also enjoy higher living stand

+See More

Sirius XM pays $3.5 billion shares to acquire the music app company Pandora.

Jonah Whanau

2018-09-25 10:35:00 Tuesday ET

Sirius XM pays $3.5 billion shares to acquire the music app company Pandora.

Sirius XM pays $3.5 billion shares to acquire the music app company Pandora. This acquisition would form the largest audio entertainment company worldwide.

+See More

What are our proprietary alpha stock signals?

Andy Yeh Alpha

2020-09-11 10:22:00 Friday ET

What are our proprietary alpha stock signals?

AYA fintech network platform provides proprietary alpha stock signals and personal finance tools. In recent times, we have completed our fresh website up

+See More

AYA finbuzz podcast offers fresh insights into the latest stock market topics, economic trends, and personal finance inspirations as of November 2019.

Daphne Basel

2019-11-26 11:30:00 Tuesday ET

AYA finbuzz podcast offers fresh insights into the latest stock market topics, economic trends, and personal finance inspirations as of November 2019.

AYA Analytica finbuzz podcast channel on YouTube November 2019 In this podcast, we discuss several topical issues as of November 2019: (1) The Trump adm

+See More

President Trump criticizes the potential media merger between AT&T and Time Warner.

Chanel Holden

2017-11-05 09:45:00 Sunday ET

President Trump criticizes the potential media merger between AT&T and Time Warner.

President Trump criticizes the potential media merger between AT&T and Time Warner, the latter of which owns the anti-Trump media network CNN. President

+See More