Confounded Interest – Anthony B. Sanders
Financial Markets And Real Estate
Inflation has been a disaster for millions of Americans. As inflation grows (highest in 40 years), fears of recession are jolting markets.
The Dow today is down 2%.
Then again, Europe is down even more.
My favorite chart for explaining the surge in inflation is M1 Money Stock around the Covid outbreak in early 2020. Which has NOT been removed.
The US Treasury 10Y-2Y yield curve just inverted.
No, this is not a real ECB currency, but it might as well be.
Slip slidin’ away
Slip slidin’ away
You know the nearer the midterm elections
The more you’re slip slidin’ away
As Bill Clinton once said about elections, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Which is bad news for Biden and Democrats after Q1’s bad GDP report of -1.6% “growth”, we now see the Atlanta Fed’s real-time GDP report for Q2 at -2.1%.
Today’s miserable construction spending report helped tank Q2’s real GDP forecast.
Its getting late in the evening since the midterms are only a couple of months away and Biden’s approval rating is miserable.
Sing it, Joe!
Run runaway! For safety to Treasuries.
A “recession shock” begins for markets following the worst first-half for the S&P 500 in more than 50 years.
And investors are running to Treasuries for safety as US Treasury 10-year yields tank 14 basis points.
Biden’s approval rating has collapse with inflation and rising gasoline prices. Note that Biden’s approval rating dropped below 50 in mid-August 2021, long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022. Gasoline prices had risen 49% since Biden’s inauguration as President, but before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Winter is coming!
The Federal Reserve under Berananke, Yellen and Powell kept monetary stimulus out there too long and rates too low, but Powell is now trying to reverse that trend to fight inflation. But how will that impact the housing market?
(Bloomberg – Prashant Gopal) The housing slowdown is helping to solve one of the US real estate market’s most intractable problems: tight inventory.
With fewer buyers competing, the number of active US listings jumped 18.7% in June from a year earlier, the largest annual increase in data going back to 2017, Realtor.com said in a report Thursday. And new sellers entered the market at an even faster rate than before the pandemic housing rally began.
The Federal Reserve is cooling off the red-hot housing market as it fights to curb inflation by driving up interest rates. The resulting spike in mortgage costs is making homes less affordable and pushing would-be buyers to the sidelines. That means properties aren’t selling as quickly and must compete with the growing number of new offerings.
I wonder if it is all the Covid monetary and fiscal stimulus that is finally getting homeowners to put their houses on the market, perhaps fearing the end of the housing price run-up with Fed-induced rate hikes?
Let’s see if The Fed’s Frolic Room (aka, open market committee) keeps driving rates up and home affordability down. Or is it The End for the house price bubble?
It took a while and trillions in fiscal and monetary stimulus to recover from Covid-era economic lockdowns, but now that the monetary stimulus is being withdrawn, the economy is stalling.
If you look at the chart below, you can see that “The Thrill Is Gone” from monetary and fiscal stimulus.
And The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index fell below 100 as M2 Money Stock YoY returns to pre-Covid levels.
You are gonna have to face it, we’re addicted to gov (stimulus).
St. Louis Fed President Bullard made a remark the other day that consumers are healthy so a recession is unlikely.
Consumers are healthy? It is true that the US U-3 uemployment rate is low (3.6% versus 14.70% in April 2020 thanks to government shutdowns over Covid). But even though unemployment is low, consumer sentiment is at its lowest point since 1977.
Generally, consumer sentiment is high when unemployment is low, but not this time around. Currently, inflation is at the highest level since March 1980 even though consumer sentiment bottomed-out in April 1980.
Here is my chart showing that REAL average hourly earnings growth YoY is negative and getting worse, hardly a sign of “healthy consumers.”
Of course, rising gasoline and diesel prices have risen dramatically since 2021, but are declining slightly thanks to the global economic slowdown (read “lower demand”).
And a M2 Money Stock (green line) declined, US rents (blue line) declined as well.
We are truly living in Birdland. As in bird-brain land.
Russia defaulted on its foreign-currency sovereign debt for the first time in a century, the culmination of ever-tougher Western sanctions that shut down payment routes to overseas creditors.
For months, the country found paths around the penalties imposed after the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. But at the end of the day on Sunday, the grace period on about $100 million of snared interest payments due May 27 expired, a deadline considered an event of default if missed.
It’s a grim marker in the country’s rapid transformation into an economic, financial and political outcast. The nation’s eurobonds have traded at distressed levels since the start of March, the central bank’s foreign reserves remain frozen, and the biggest banks are severed from the global financial system.
But given the damage already done to the economy and markets, the default is also mostly symbolic for now, and matters little to Russians dealing with double-digit inflation and the worst economic contraction in years.
War is hell and Ukraine is paying the price as well.
Meanwhile, European sovereign bond yields are up over 10 basis point this morning, but not UK and Sweden (non-ECB nations).
No problemo, says James “Bully” Bullard, President of the St Louis Federal Reserve. Bullard said that US recession fears are overblown with consumers “healthy.”
Really Jim?
Inflation is so bad they REAL average hourly earnings growth keeps falling and is now -3.34% YoY.
Apparently, real GDP growth of ZERO doesn’t bother Bullard either.
Apparently, we are still Under The Thumb of The Federal Reserve.
The kids running Washington DC are not as sharp as pistols (which they want to take away) when they do the DC stomp.
Thanks to massive Fed monetary stimulus still stalking the housing market, US new home sales rose +10.7% MoM (from April to May), but were down -5.9% YoY (from May 2021 to May 2022) as mortgage rates rose.
Median price of new home sales rose 42% since May 2021, thanks to Fed stimulypto. And Federal government stimulus spending.
Yes, like the predators from the movies, The Fed’s balance sheet is still stalking markets.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
The talk of a gasoline tax “holiday” out of Washington DC is pure Kabuki theater. It is purely a sign of the times with Biden still trying to blame Putin for rising gasoline prices and inflation and ignoring his anti-fossil fuel policies that helped drive energy prices AND inflation through the roof.
Daily regular gasoline prices have dipped below $5.00 to $4.94 while diesel fuel, the lifeline of the shipping industry, rose slightly to $5.80. I guess the folks shipping food and other goods don’t get a holiday.
Note that the implied Fed target rate has fallen a bit as the probability of a recession increases.
And why are banks stashing so much money at The Fed in the form of reverse repos? Fear of recession, perhaps?
The Biden Administration is settling all kinds of records, and none are good.
Confounded Interest - Anthony B. Sanders 
You must be logged in to post a comment.