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.
2018-11-07 08:30:00 Wednesday ET
PwC releases a new study of top innovators worldwide as of November 2018. This study assesses the top 1,000 global companies that spend the most on R&D
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
2018-11-19 09:38:00 Monday ET
The Trump administration mulls over antitrust actions against Amazon, Facebook, and Google. President Trump indicates that the $5 billion fine against Googl
2017-06-09 06:37:00 Friday ET
To complement President Trump's pro-business economic policies such as low taxation, new infrastructure, greater job creation, and technological in
2019-06-15 10:28:00 Saturday ET
The Sino-American trade war may slash global GDP by $600 billion. If the Trump administration imposes tariffs on all the Chinese imports and China retaliate
2018-03-09 08:33:00 Friday ET
David Solomon succeeds Lloyd Blankfein as the new CEO of Goldman Sachs. Unlike his predecessors Lloyd Blankfein and Gary Cohn, Solomon has been an investmen