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

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

American state attorneys general begin bipartisan antitrust investigations into Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

Charlene Vos

2019-10-21 10:35:00 Monday ET

American state attorneys general begin bipartisan antitrust investigations into Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

American state attorneys general begin bipartisan antitrust investigations into the market power and corporate behavior of central tech titans such as Apple

+See More

PayPal earns great fintech reputation from its massive worldwide network of 250+ million users.

Peter Prince

2018-10-19 13:37:00 Friday ET

PayPal earns great fintech reputation from its massive worldwide network of 250+ million users.

PayPal earns great fintech reputation from its massive worldwide network of 250+ million active users. As PayPal beats the revenue and profit expectations o

+See More

AT&T wins court approval to take over Time Warner with a trademark $85 billion bid despite the Trump prior dissent due to antitrust concerns.

Chanel Holden

2018-06-07 10:36:00 Thursday ET

AT&T wins court approval to take over Time Warner with a trademark $85 billion bid despite the Trump prior dissent due to antitrust concerns.

AT&T wins court approval to take over Time Warner with a trademark $85 billion bid despite the Trump administration prior dissent due to antitrust conce

+See More

The recent Bristol-Myers Squibb acquisition of American Celgene is the $90 billion biggest biotech deal in history.

Jacob Miramar

2019-01-10 17:31:00 Thursday ET

The recent Bristol-Myers Squibb acquisition of American Celgene is the $90 billion biggest biotech deal in history.

The recent Bristol-Myers Squibb acquisition of American Celgene is the $90 billion biggest biotech deal in history. The resultant biopharma goliath would be

+See More

America faces income inequality, political polarization, and dysfunctional governance.

Rose Prince

2018-05-17 07:41:00 Thursday ET

America faces income inequality, political polarization, and dysfunctional governance.

Has America become a democratic free land of crumbling infrastructure, galloping income inequality, bitter political polarization, and dysfunctional governa

+See More