Confounded Interest – Anthony B. Sanders
Financial Markets And Real Estate
The US housing market is still suffering a hangover from Biden’s Presidency (high housing prices, high food prices, high inflation, high oil/gas prices, etc.) Housing prices are the highest in history, now we have FHA delinquencies at almost 15%.
Way to go, Joe!
German 10-year bond yields are trading above euro interest rate swaps for the first time in history (-12.62), a watershed moment for these markets that underlines just how much investors have soured on government debt.
Bund yields +30bps today – the biggest spike on record going back to 1990.
Is the US next?
The mortgage market is back! Time to polka!!
Mortgage applications increased 20.4 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending February 28, 2025.
The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, increased 20.4 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index increased 22 percent compared with the previous week. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index increased 9 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index increased 12 percent compared with the previous week and was 2 percent higher than the same week one year ago.
The Refinance Index increased 37 percent from the previous week and was 83 percent higher than the same week one year ago.
Thank God the adults are in charge in DC instead of the children we saw at Trump’s speech last night.
Trump inherited a brittle economy from “The Fool” Joe Biden. And it is shown up.
The Trump Administration is fighting the remnants of Biden’s policies by cutting spending (DOGE) and deregulation.
All this has resulted in a soaring US Dollar.
Tarot cards have officially renamed “The Fool” card as “The Biden.” Although in Washington DC, there is no shortage of fools (see Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Rashida Talib (D-MI).
Former Federal Reserve Chair and Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was so in on Biden’s failed economic spending spree that she caused a fiscal disaster by refinancing Federal debt at the short end of the Treasury curve. Leaving Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent a real mess. As in $9.2 TRILLION.
With interest rates rising, this is a planned disaster by Biden/Pelosi/Schumer.
The Fiscal 3 Stooges!
We are now seeing the aftermath of Biden’s failed, top-down, Soviet-style economic policies (or follicies). And it is grim. Bidenomics is now fully exposed like The Fully Month. Except this is The Full Joe!
The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2025 is -1.5 percent on February 28, down from 2.3 percent on February 19. After recent releases from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis and the US Census Bureau, the nowcast of the contribution of net exports to first-quarter real GDP growth fell from -0.41 percentage points to -3.70 percentage points while the nowcast of first-quarter real personal consumption expenditures growth fell from 2.3 percent to 1.3 percent.
Another sign of Biden’s failed, top-down cronynomics is housing. Pending home sales fell to 70.6.
Little did we know that Biden’s falling on Air Force One’s stairs was symbolic of what was to come.
Elon Musk, who Democrats consider to be The Borg King, and DOGE have laid-off many Federal workers. Today’s jobless claims report revealed that over 2 million Federal workers filed for unemployment benefits.
DOGE has saved taxpayers over $143 BILLION thus far.
Housing is simply unaffordable in many parts of the USA and world. Its the same all over the world. except Romania and Finland.
The most unaffordble countries are Portugal, Canada, the USA, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic. The most affordable? Romania, Finland, Italy, and Bulgaria.
For the USA, Hawaii and California are the least affordable while West Virginia and Iowa are the most affordable.
The US got hit with 2 deadly viruses in 2020. First, Covid-19 struck then another deadly virus struck in late 2020 with the election of DEI-obsessed Joe Biden, the worst President in history.
With rising interest rates and housing prices under “Clueless Joe,” buying conditions for housing plunged from around 160 under Trump to an abysmal 30 under Biden. And now Trump.
To keep house prices soaring to new highs, The Fed need to keep on printing!
For the second straight month, US home prices accelerated YoY in December (according to the latest data from S&P Global’s Case-Shiller Index). The 20-City Composite saw prices jump 0.5% MoM (faster than expected and the biggest jump since June) and accelerating MoM for the 3rd straight month.
Only Tampa FLA of the top 20 metro areas had a negative YoY price change, but 14 of the top 20 metro areas experienced price declines from November to December: Atlanta, Charlotte, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Tampa and Washington DC.
Doesn’t the lead singer for The Gentrys sorty of look like Matt Damon??
Confounded Interest - Anthony B. Sanders 
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