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.
2023-09-21 09:26:00 Thursday ET

Jordi Gali delves into the science of the New Keynesian monetary policy framework with economic output and inflation stabilization. Jordi Gali (2015)
2025-07-05 11:23:00 Saturday ET

Former New York Times science author and Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman explains why working with emotional intelligence helps hone our social skills f
2019-09-23 12:25:00 Monday ET

Volcker, Greenspan, Bernanke, and Yellen contribute to a Wall Street Journal op-ed on monetary policy independence. These former Federal Reserve chiefs unit
2018-09-25 10:35:00 Tuesday ET

Sirius XM pays $3.5 billion shares to acquire the music app company Pandora. This acquisition would form the largest audio entertainment company worldwide.
2021-11-22 11:29:00 Monday ET

U.S. judiciary subcommittee delves into the market dominance of online platforms in terms of the antitrust, commercial, and administrative law in America.
2019-07-21 09:37:00 Sunday ET

Facebook introduces a new cryptocurrency Libra as a fresh medium of exchange for e-commerce. Libra will be available to all the 2 billion active users on Fa