This will not end well. We’ve got trouble in (Potomac) River City!
Credit card interest rates have skyrocketed to a shocking 21.51%. Moreover, credit card debt has hit record highs1.51%.

Confounded Interest – Anthony B. Sanders
Financial Markets And Real Estate
This will not end well. We’ve got trouble in (Potomac) River City!
Credit card interest rates have skyrocketed to a shocking 21.51%. Moreover, credit card debt has hit record highs1.51%.

The Fed’s theme song: Keep on printing!
Look at this chart of the S&P 500 index against M2 Money stock.

And this chart of Case-Shiller home prices against M2 Money.

Bottom line? The Fed has to keep on printing money. Otherwise, the US economy will collapse like a cheap building.
Here is Fed Chair Jerome Powell creating assets bubbles.

Like the Go-Go’s song Manic Monday, it is a manic Monday for stocks. The awful jobs report from last Friday is reverberating through markets. The VIX (fear index) soared to 52.2 this morning.

MY fear is that Congress will go wild and start (mis)spending trillions of dollars again on hare-brained projects like green energy (and electric cars) when our electric grid can’t support the increase in electric cars.
US 2s/10s yield spread is now flat for the 1st time since 2022 on aggressive repricing of Fed rate cuts. US 2y yields have plunged by 70bps to 3.69% since last Wed while US 10y yields only dropped by 40bps in the same time.

Voters are head-over–heels for Kamala Harris, a dim-witted Marxist authoritarian.
Remember the TV show “The Biggest :Loser”? That show was about weight loss.
Now The Federal Reserve has posted a record loss of $114 BILLION IN 2023.

The cause of the loss? Massive expansion of The Fed’s balance sheet coupled with rising interest rates. The two year track record of The Fed is truly appaling. With a bloated balance sheet, rising interest rates have caused staggering losses.

The Fed is the biggest loser!

And the biggest losers!

Bidenomics (actually Biden/Harrisnomics) is all about huge payoffs to large, powerful donors. A good example is The Chips Act, intended to bring chip manufacturing back to the US from Taiwan, China, etc. Biden/Harris doled out $8.5 BILLION to Intel … which just laid off 15% of it’s labor force or 15k workers.
Intel has suspended dividends and its stock price has crashed from above $45 in March now down to $21.48, a 53% loss in 4 months.

Bear in mind that a Harris Presidency would be more of the same wasteful, Communist-style centralized economic (mis)management. Perhaps even worse.

And on that dreadful jobs report on Friday, the VIX fear index soared (white line) to its highest level since March 2023.

Regulate! Regulate! Dance to THEIR music!
According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Biden/Harris heaped droves of regulations on American families in the amount of $15,000 per family.
Here is a breakdown of the annual cost of regulations:

And “China” Kamala (ChiKam) plans even MORE regulations!
DC bureaucrats are out of control. Treasury Secretary Yellen calls for $78 TRILLION to tackle climate change. So to quote The Carpenters, they’ve only just begun to regulate.

What’s it going to be? Mortgage rate increases or balance sheet (MBS) reductions?
Since the Covid outbreak in early 2020, The Fed went wild with rate cuts and massive and unpredented balance sheet expansion.

Let’s look at The Fed’s puchase of agency MBS and mortgage rates. From 2020 2022, The Fed continued to buy agency MBS. But in 2022, all hell broke loose as The Fed went crazy RAISING rates, but slowly began unwinding their balance sheet. The result? Mortgage rates began to climb. In fact, the US conforming mortgage rate for 30 years has risen 102% since early 2022. The Fed is only slowing unwinding their MBS holdings.

Despite the struggles in the residential housing market, the COMMERCIAL mortgage market is a trainwreck.

What will The Fed do?? After all, nothing from nothing beats nothing.
This scene from the film “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” sums up our political plight quite nicley. Politicians spend like crazy to stay in power (Biden/Harris) are excellent examples). Politicians promises endless money, then shoot the economy. The US is broke and relies on printing money and boowed funds to stay afloat. Harris wants to raise taxes on everyone to fund her plans like even MORE emphasis of failed green energy schemes and endless foreign wars. I doubt if Harris could defend her spending plans in light of the US already $35 TRILLION in debt.

Even more worrisome if thev fact that DC politicians have promised entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, etc. totalling $217.63 Trillion. Or 623% higher than the rapidly increasing national debt.
Biden/Harris raised thr national debt by 25% in less than 4 years. And Harris wants to increase spending! Harris wants illegal immigrants put on Social Security and Medicare, further bankrupting those entitlement programs.

Let’s see Harris explain her indefensible budget (like raising taxes and not hurting economic growth).

Cacklenomics strikes again!
The University of Michigan consumer survey revealed that buying conditions for housing just hit an all-time low.

High house prices and high mortgage rates aren’t helping.

Purchase loan demand keeps dropping.

After a disappointing dump in existing home sales in June, new home sales just confirmed the slowdown, dropping 0.6% MoM (notably below the 3.4% MoM expected) and also saw a major downward revision in May from -11.3% MoM to -14.9% MoM. That leaves new home sales down 7.4% YoY…

That shift dragged the new home sales SAAR down to 617k – basically unchanged since 2016…

While the median new home price rose in June, it remains below the median existing home price…

It appears the homebuilder subsidy fad is wearing off as mortgage rates show no signs of easing significantly…

Of course, none of this should be a surprise as homebuyer confidence has collapsed to an all-time record low…

Will cutting rates help?
Probably not. Bidenomics is now called Harrisnomics (or Cacklenomics) since Harris as VP was the tiereaker in the US Senate. So, she holds some responsibility for the outrageous, wasteful spending in Washington DC.

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