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.
2025-10-05 17:31:00 Sunday ET

Stock Synopsis: With a new Python program, we use, adapt, apply, and leverage each of the mainstream Gemini Gen AI models to conduct this comprehensive fund
2019-01-27 12:39:00 Sunday ET

British Prime Minister Theresa May faces her landslide defeat in the parliamentary vote 432-to-202 against her Brexit deal. British Parliament rejects the M
2018-09-30 14:34:00 Sunday ET

Goldman, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, and UBS face an antitrust lawsuit. In this lawsuit, a U.S. judge alleges the illegal cons
2018-02-07 06:38:00 Wednesday ET

The new Fed chairman Jerome Powell faces a new challenge in the form of both core CPI and CPI inflation rate hikes toward 1.8%-2.1% year-over-year with stro
2019-01-09 07:33:00 Wednesday ET

Apple revises down its global sales revenue estimate to $83 billion due to subpar smartphone sales in China. Apple CEO Tim Cook points out the fact that he
2019-05-13 12:38:00 Monday ET

Brent crude oil prices spike to $70-$75 per barrel after the Trump administration stops waiving economic sanctions on Iranian oil exports. U.S. State Secret