2018-10-27 09:34:00 Sat ET
stock market gold oil stock return s&p 500 asset market stabilization asset price fluctuations stocks bonds currencies commodities funds term spreads credit spreads fair value spreads asset investments
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.
2017-05-13 07:28:00 Saturday ET

America's Top 5 tech firms, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook have become the most valuable publicly listed companies in the world. These
2018-12-05 09:38:00 Wednesday ET

Federal Reserve publishes its inaugural flagship financial stability report. Fed Chair Jerome Powell applauds both low inflation (2%) and low unemployment (
2023-06-28 09:29:00 Wednesday ET

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff delve into several centuries of cross-country crisis data to find the key root causes of financial crises for asset marke
2019-10-17 08:35:00 Thursday ET

The European Central Bank expects to further reduce negative interest rates with new quantitative government bond purchases. The ECB commits to further cutt
2023-09-28 08:26:00 Thursday ET

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson show a constant economic tussle between society and the state in the hot pursuit of liberty. Daron Acemoglu and James R
2019-03-27 11:28:00 Wednesday ET

OECD cuts the global economic growth forecast from 3.5% to 3.3% for the current fiscal year 2019-2020. The global economy suffers from economic protraction