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.
2018-10-13 10:44:00 Saturday ET

Dow Jones tumbles 3% or 831 points while NASDAQ tanks 4%, and this negative investor sentiment rips through most European and Asian stock markets in early-O
2019-10-19 16:35:00 Saturday ET

European economic integration seems to have gone backwards primarily due to the recent Brexit movement. Brexit, key European sovereign debt, and French and
2022-10-15 09:34:00 Saturday ET

Internal capital markets and financial constraints Duchin (JF 2010) empirically finds that multidivisional firms with robust internal capital markets ret
2025-01-22 08:35:08 Wednesday ET

President Donald Trump blames China for the long prevalent U.S. trade deficits and several other social and economic deficiencies. In recent years, Pres
2025-05-21 04:27:10 Wednesday ET

Carol Dweck describes, discusses, and delves into the scientific reasons why the growth mindset often helps motivate individuals, teams, and managers to acc
2019-10-05 07:27:00 Saturday ET

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin indicates that there is a good conceptual trade agreement between China and the U.S. in regard to intellectual property pr