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

Federal Reserve normalizes the current interest rate hike to signal its own independence from the White House.

Apple Boston

2019-01-08 17:46:00 Tuesday ET

Federal Reserve normalizes the current interest rate hike to signal its own independence from the White House.

President Trump forces the Federal Reserve to normalize the current interest rate hike to signal its own monetary policy independence from the White House.

+See More

Sino-American trade talks make positive progress over 3 consecutive days.

Joseph Corr

2019-01-17 10:41:00 Thursday ET

Sino-American trade talks make positive progress over 3 consecutive days.

Sino-American trade talks make positive progress over 3 consecutive days as S&P 500 and global stock market indices post 3-day win streaks. Asian and Eu

+See More

Federal Reserve raises the interest rate again in mid-2018 in response to 2% inflation and wage growth.

John Fourier

2018-07-09 09:39:00 Monday ET

Federal Reserve raises the interest rate again in mid-2018 in response to 2% inflation and wage growth.

The Federal Reserve raises the interest rate again in mid-2018 in response to 2% inflation and wage growth. The current neutral interest rate hike neither b

+See More

Yale macro economist Stephen Roach draws 3 major conclusions with respect to the Chinese long-run view of the current tech trade conflict with America.

Joseph Corr

2019-09-05 09:26:00 Thursday ET

Yale macro economist Stephen Roach draws 3 major conclusions with respect to the Chinese long-run view of the current tech trade conflict with America.

Yale macro economist Stephen Roach draws 3 major conclusions with respect to the Chinese long-run view of the current tech trade conflict with America. Firs

+See More

The social media factor serves as a new measure of investor sentiment in addition to the fundamental factors.

Rose Prince

2017-05-07 06:39:00 Sunday ET

The social media factor serves as a new measure of investor sentiment in addition to the fundamental factors.

While the original five-factor asset pricing model arises from a quasi-lifetime of top empirical research by Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama and his long-time co

+See More

The recent arrest of HuaWei CFO may upend the trade truce between America and China.

Fiona Sydney

2018-12-13 08:30:00 Thursday ET

The recent arrest of HuaWei CFO may upend the trade truce between America and China.

The recent arrest of HuaWei senior executive manager may upend the trade truce between America and China. At the request of several U.S. authorities, Canadi

+See More