As the strong building permits in months passed and even continue today suggests, the new home sales report just released rose by 11.9% to 811,000. They revised upward November’s number to 725,000. Economists were projecting 51,000 fewer homes sold. It was a very good report. It is likely that the prospect of higher interest rates […]
Housing continues to remain strong with December’s housing starts rising to 1.7 million from 1.68 million in November. More importantly, December’s building permits rose sharply to 1.87 million from 1.72 million meaning the future of housing starts should remain strong. With slowly rising interest rate, as the FED has promised, eventually mortgage rates will be […]
Every month ADP reports on added new jobs by private employers. This number always comes out a few days before the office non-farm payroll report. It provides a hint as to what the official report will look like without the public job’s numbers. This morning the number was 897,000 new jobs. That was far and […]
This morning a flurry of numbers were released from the various governmental offices concerning the economy and its direction for November. First, the PPI (Producer Price Index) showed stronger inflation than expected and more than in October. It was up .8% from up .6% the month before. Import prices were higher as well. Retail sales […]
Last month’s jobs report was weaker than expected though we still produced a significant number of new jobs. This week the number of Job openings for October rose from 10.6 million, which is a pretty large number historically speaking, to 11.0 million. If you couple that with the quit rate, which is the number of […]
September was weak for retail sales even though this week’s revision had a .8% improvement. For October there was a strong bounce-back +1.7%, when you exclude autos, a big-ticket item, it was still +1.7%. Industrial production jumped 1.6% from shrinking 1.3% in September. Capacity utilization also rose to 76.4% from 75.2%. Part of the reason […]
This has been the topic of concern for months. The FED seems to be only marginally worried having repeatedly stated that it is transitory. The bond market and other pundits appear to be separating themselves from that belief. This morning October’s CPI (Consumer Price Index) was released, and the expectation was for an increase from […]
ADP reported earlier in the week that 517,000 new private-sector jobs were created in October. This morning the official report came in counting private and public jobs. That number was 531,000. These are very strong numbers pushing the unemployment rate to 4.6% from 4.8%. At the same time, hourly earnings rose .4% which is a […]
Zillow is well known as the website for estimating home values. They have virtually no competition in that space. Then they decided that it would be a good idea to start buying property and get into the buying and selling of real property. They lost $330 million in the most recent third quarter and decided […]
The FCC, in a vote of 4 to 0, banned China Telecom Corp. This is a large firm in China but does not have much reach in the U.S. However, the FCC already banned Huawei and four other firms from China. This new ban is despite the Biden administration attempting to smooth over tension between […]