Confounded Interest – Anthony B. Sanders
Financial Markets And Real Estate
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??
In appreciation of German conservatives winning in their recent election,
Citi’s economic surprise index fell to -7.80 in February. This is the remnant of Biden/Democrats horrible economic policies and fear of Trump’s tariff policies.
Gold, Bitcoin and the S&P 500 are doing quite well on the prospects for growth in the US under Trump.
The US economy like an aircraft carrier, doesn’t turn on a dime. Think of the Japanese carriers at Midway in WWII. Thanks Admiral Biden! And Rear Admiral Harris!
Did Jerome Powell and The Federal Reserve push markets too hard?
Sales of existing single-family houses, townhouses, condos, and co-ops that closed in January dropped by 4.9% from December, seasonally adjusted, to an annual rate of 4.08 million sales, according to the National Association of Realtors today.
This rate of sales was up just 2.0% from the abysmally low levels a year ago – 2024 as a whole had been the worst sales year since 1995 – and flat with the abysmally low levels two years ago.
Compared to January 2021, the sales rate was down by 36%, compared to January 2019, the sales rate was down by 25%
On a NON seasonally adjusted basis, things look even more grim.
Active inventory is up 27.6% YoY. As mortgage rates are projected to rise, things can get worse.
Mortgage rates continue to hover around 7%. Mortgage rates rose 164% under Biden!
Maybe if Fed Chair Jerome Powell is forced to wear Sky Saxon of The Seed’s wizard outfit, he will improve his policies.
I call this the house latitudes. Horse latitudes is a belt of calm air and sea occurring in both the northern and southern hemispheres between the trade winds and the westerlies. And when the ships motion stalled, the crews would jetison their cargo of horses to the delight of sharks! So, we are in state of HOUSE latitudes where the wind pushing mortgage refis and purchase apps. So we are all riders on the storm.
Mortgage applications decreased 6.6 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending February 14, 2025.
The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, decreased 6.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index decreased 4 percent compared with the previous week. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index decreased 6 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index decreased 1 percent compared with the previous week and was 7 percent higher than the same week one year ago.
The Refinance Index decreased 7 percent from the previous week and was 39 percent higher than the same week one year ago.
Privately-owned housing starts in January were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,366,000. This is 9.8 percent below the revised December estimate of 1,515,000 and is 0.7 percent below the January 2024 rate of 1,376,000. Single-family housing starts in January were at a rate of 993,000; this is 8.4 percent below the revised December figure of 1,084,000. The January rate for units in buildings with five units or more was 355,000.
Janet Yelllen, the former Federal Reserve Chair and Treasury Secretary under clueless Joe Biden was a disaster in every respect. As Fed Chair, she was noteworthy for her clinging to low rates for too long. And as Treasury Secretary, she is noteworthy for her gross fiscal mismanagement (look at the deficit and debt crisis!). Now Zero Hedge has this disastrous report of $4.7 TRILLION in virtuallly untraceable Treasury payments.
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Monday revealed its finding that $4.7 trillion in disbursements by the US Treasury are “almost impossible” to trace, thanks to a rampant disregard for the basic accounting practice of using of tracking codes when dishing out money.
With a debt load of $36.5 trillion and D.O.G.E. clock at $109 million and growing. Not to mention the $227 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
Mind you, it’s not as if such a federal tracking system wasn’t already in place — it simply went casually unused for all sorts of payouts adding up to an almost unfathomable $4.7 trillion. Without Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) identification codes associated with those payouts, there’s little hope in figuring out where all that money went.
“In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” DOGE announced via its X account. Thanks to DOGE, those “optional” days are over. “As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going,” DOGE added.
Musk celebrated the move. “Major improvement in Treasury payment integrity going live!” he tweeted. “This was a combined effort of DOGE, USTreasury and FederalReserve. Nice work by all.”
DOGE’s scrutiny of various government agencies is eliciting high-pitched shrieks from nearly every leftist in America, from establishment politicians who don’t want the curtain that hides their hijinks and grifting torn down, to your liberal sister-in-law who thinks the government has an endless supply of money and that it spends it all virtuously.
Earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pushed back on portrayals of DOGE employees as reckless rogues. “These are highly trained professionals,” he told Bloomberg. “This is not some roving band going around doing things. This is methodical and it is going to yield big savings.”
In the wake of the latest revelation that makes normal people glad that DOGE teams are scouring the federal government, Democrats desperately tried to find a way to make it sound bad that DOGE exposed trillions in untraceable payouts and promptly instituted tighter accounting discipline.
Meanwhile, leftists have also been foaming at the mouth over news that DOGE staffers are looking into the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) books, as if they were going to start rerouting funds to Tesla. Considering Social Security is careening toward mandatory benefit cuts as soon as 2033, everyone should welcome a team of financial professionals making sure the system isn’t being drained by improper payments.
Of course, that appears to be exactly what’s been happening. On Sunday night, Musk said DOGE might be on the trail of “the biggest fraud in history,” as SSA data appears to show that 20.789 million Americans over the age of 100 are collecting Social Security retirement benefits. That includes 12 million who are purportedly over 120 years old.
Bent on derailing DOGE, Democrats have sued to prevent the organization from accessing federal data associated with the Office of Personnel Management, and the Health and Human Services, Education, Energy, Transportation, Labor and Commerce departments. On Monday, the federal judge handling the request for a restraining order expressed skepticism over Democrats’ challenge, noting that their “evidence” was largely media speculation about potential harms springing from DOGE’s activities: “The courts can’t act based on media reports. We can’t do that.“
A ruling is expected Tuesday. Here’s looking forward to DOGE proceeding to uncover a relentless string of scandals for months and months to come.
The left has come out in force to attack D.O.G.E. and Elon Musk. Why? First, The Left doesn’t want to upset the candy apple cart (government waste and corruption). Second, the Left wants to pretend that they hate the rich (although George/Alexander Soros are huge donors, not to mention Bill Gates and most of Hollywood elites are billionaires/millionaires). But the saddest act of all are Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. These two clowns had the Social Security data and never looked at it … allegedly.
What would they have found if they had looked at the Social Security books? According to Elon Musk, they would have discovered 20,788,904 people at the age of 100 and above. That is significantly higher that the entire population of Naples Florida at 19,704.
Here is what Elon Musk discovered about people receiving Social Security (and disability payments). Joe and Kamala didnt notice someone that was between 360 and 369 years of age??
The point is that this is a collosal embarrasment. And epic fraud. And even more vexxing is that 394,943,364 are collecting Social Security while the total population of the USA is 334 Million?? That leaves 60 million more people receiving Social Security payments than there are people in the USA!
Don’t tell Elon about candied apples that have replaced government cheese in the Federal government giveaway program for votes! And Cloward/Piven!
Mike McGlone has an interesting perspective on Bitcoin versus Gold.
Gold $3,000, Bitcoin $70,000?
Is there good reason for reversion lower? My bias is leaning that way, especially if the US hashtag#stockmarket reverses some of last year’s almost $12 trillion advance, about 40% of GDP.
Bitcoin approaching $150,000 in 2025 might suggest another $12+ trillion year of US stockmarket wealth creation, inflation and Fed tightening. Heading toward $50,000 could coincide with some typical deflation following the inflation and put the Fed at ease. Up about 10% since Bitcoin first closed above $100,000, gold may sniffing out a bit of risk-asset normalization. So it appears gold is winning.
Full disclosure: I own both. Plus silver. And a house.
When the (fiscal) music’s over. For corrupt politicians, that is!
Mike Shedlock (aka, Mish) had a great article on the fiscal dumpster fire facing the Trump Administration. After you get a load of the long-run deficits and debt load, you can understand why Trump wants to cut Federal waste (Doge).
The US deficit for the first four months of fiscal Year 2025 is $838 billion, up $306 billion. Adjusted, the increase is more like $157 billion to $225 billion.
The federal budget deficit totaled $838 billion in the first four months of fiscal year 2025, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. That amount is $306 billion more than the deficit recorded during the same period last fiscal year. Revenues were $11 billion (or 1 percent) higher, and outlays were $317 billion (or 15 percent) higher.
The change in the deficit was influenced by the timing of outlays and revenues, which decreased the deficit during the first four months of fiscal year 2024 but increased it during the same period this fiscal year. Outlays in October 2023 were reduced by shifts in the timing of payments that were due on October 1, 2023, a Sunday. (The payments were made that September.) Outlays in the first four months of 2025 rose, on net, because payments due on February 1, 2025, a Saturday, were made in January. If not for those shifts, the deficit so far this fiscal year would have been $750 billion, or $146 billion more than the shortfall at this point last year. Part of the deficit increase in 2025 also arises from the postponement of some tax deadlines from 2023 to 2024 (described below), which boosted receipts in 2024.
The long-run deficits are grim, according to the CBO.
Outlays in the first four months of fiscal year 2025 were $2.4 trillion, CBO estimates, $317 billion more than during the same period last year. If not for the timing shifts discussed above, outlays so far in fiscal year 2025 would have been $157 billion (or 7 percent) greater than outlays during the same four months in fiscal year 2024. The discussion below reflects adjustments to exclude the effects of those timing shifts.
Maxine Waters is an unhappy girl along with most Democrats about Trump and Musk looking into USAID.
Welcome to a new world under Trump.
It’s no fun paying for illegal aliens. And under Biden/Harris, there are a lot of them in the USA. And they have been taking American jobs too.
Most of the job gains in the past few years, and especially 2024, were a mirage, and following the dramatic August 2024 preliminary data revision which vaporized 818K jobs (which had never existed in the first place.
Over 1 Mmillion foreign-born workers found a job in January … but virtually no native borns.
And in the longer view, you can see the Biden/Harris effect after 2021.
Biden/Harris were economic heartbreakers. For the middle class, not for the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders class who made out like bandits under Biden’s corrupt leadership.
Big pharma owns Bernie, Liz, Chuckie, Patty Murray, Warnock and Wyden.
Confounded Interest - Anthony B. Sanders 
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