Wolf Street - Fed chair Powell was bombarded by essentially the same question over and over again today during the press conference after the FOMC hiked its policy rates to 5.25% at the top of the range. Reporters were trying to nail him down: Has a decision been made about “pausing” the rate hikes in June? And he […]

Wolf Street - The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, released today, dropped another $30 billion for the week, to $8.56 trillion, bringing the plunge in the five weeks since peak bank bailout to $171 billion, as quantitative tightening (QT) continued at the normal pace and liquidity support shifts and unwinds, though First Republic seems to be sucking hard on […]

Wolf Street - The median price of all types of previously owned homes – houses, condo, co-ops – whose sales closed in March, fell year-over-year by 0.9% to $375,700, according to the National Association of Realtors. This was the second year-over-year decline in a row since February 2012, when the market emerged from Housing Bust 1 (historic data […]

Wolf Street - he spring selling season is now in full swing in Canada. So let’s see.  Sales of all types of homes rose by 1.4% in March from February, after the 1.4% increase in February from January, so on a year-over-year basis, sales plunged by only 34% from a year ago, the smallest decline since September. And […]

Wolf Street - he Consumer Price Index (CPI) for March, released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was marked by plunging energy prices and surging services prices. Food inflation slowed, and month to month actually dipped for the first time in nearly three years. But durable goods inflation month-to-month suddenly rose again, after having been negative for […]

Wolf Street - The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet plunged by $101 billion in two weeks – by $74 billion in the current week and by $27 billion in the prior week – as quantitative tightening (QT) continued at the normal pace and as banks have started paying back the liquidity support offered by the Fed when Silicon Valley Bank […]

Wolf Street - People – and I mean massive numbers of people – have finally figured out that they’ve been getting screwed by near-0% interest rates on their bank deposits, and they’re moving huge sums of money around, as deposits have suddenly turned into hot money, forcing banks to respond by offering better deals. And the land is […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Inflation, Interest Rates, Retail Sales

Wolf Street - It makes sense in this era of high inflation, QT, rising policy interest rates, and high financial fragility in the banking system, after years of money printing and interest rate repression. The new regime was already tested successfully by the Bank of England last fall: Tightening through rate hikes and QT while simultaneously providing liquidity […]

Wolf Street - This is the beginning of spring selling season. So let’s see. Home sales in Canada rose by 2.3% in February from January, but that was less of an uptick than it should have been, and on a year-over-year basis, sales plunged 40%, compared to the 37% plunge in January. Prices of single-family houses in February […]

Wolf Street - The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for February showed once again that inflation rages in services at the worst levels in four decades, while inflation in many goods categories continue to back off: Services without energy services: annual inflation jumped by 7.3%, a four-decade high, driven by housing, food services (food away from home), auto insurance, […]

Wolf Street - Silicon Valley Bank, a California state-chartered bank that was uniquely exposed to the massive all-encompassing startup bubble during the Free Money era – a bubble that is now imploding spectacularly amid what is called a mass extinction event among startups – was shut down and taken over Friday morning by the California Department of Financial […]

Wolf Street - This is the transcript of my podcast on Sunday, February 26, THE WOLF STREET REPORT. The housing market in the United States has turned down, and in some big markets very dramatically so. Other markets lag a little behind. That’s how it went during the last Housing Bust, that I now call Housing Bust #1. […]

Wolf Street - ome sales in Canada plunged by 37% in January, compared to a year earlier, amid rising inventory. Home prices dropped by 0.5% in January from December, by 12.6% year-over-year, and by 17.8% from the peak in March 2022, the 10th month-to-month decline in a row, according to the Canada Composite Home Price Index by the […]

Wolf Street - Sales of battery-electric vehicles (EVs) in California spiked by 62% in 2022, to 285,199 vehicles, according to registration data released by the California New Car Dealer Association (CNCDA). And the market share of EVs nearly doubled to 17% of total new vehicle sales: Overall vehicle sales in California, ICE vehicles and EVs combined, fell by […]

Wolf Street - Housing Bubble 2 continues to deflate relentlessly, no matter what data set we’re looking at. Today we got the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index for “November,” which is a three-month moving average of home sales that were entered into public records in September, October, and November, reflecting deals made largely in August through October. Prices in all […]

Wolf Street - he Bank of Canada hiked its policy rates by 25 basis points on Wednesday, the 8th rate hike in a row, totaling 425 basis points in 10 months, bringing the target of the overnight rate to 4.5%. QT will continue and “is complementing the restrictive stance of the policy rate,” the BOC said in the […]

Wolf Street - The used-vehicle market now has a huge hangover: The price spike from August 2020 till early 2022. Over this period, retail prices spiked by mind-boggling ridiculous amounts – 40% per the average used vehicle listing price, according to Cox Automotive; 53% per the used-vehicle CPI, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics – though there […]

Wolf Street - The thing about new vehicle sales in the US is that even in good years, they’re bad, and in bad years, they’re terrible. In 2022, total new vehicles delivered to retail customers and fleets (dominated by rental fleets), fell by 8% from the already terrible 2021, to 13.7 million vehicles, below where deliveries had been […]

Wolf Street - The year 2022 ended with: S&P 500 Index: -19.4% from a year ago, -20.3% from its high on January 3, 2022. Nasdaq Composite: -33.1% from a year ago, -35.4% from its high on November 22, 2021. The whole mess started in that infamous February 2021, with the popping of the bubble of the most ridiculously […]

Wolf Street - hat is the burden on households from servicing their debts and other financial obligations, in terms of their disposable income? That’s perhaps the most important debt measure, and the question we’re going to grapple with in a moment. The pandemic-era policies left households flush with money, allowed them to catch up with past-dues, and allowed […]

Wolf Street - The Canada MLS Home Price Index, which tracks all types of homes, dropped by 1.3% in November from October, and is now down 16.4% from the peak in March 2022, according to data from the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA). This brought the year-over-year decline to 4.4%. In Canadian dollars, the composite benchmark price dropped […]

Wolf Street - This has now been the rule for Fed meetings since the fall of 2021, when it stopped brushing off inflation. At every meeting since then, the FOMC pivoted more hawkish than at the prior meeting: Each “dot plot” projected a higher peak interest rate than the prior dot plot, and it projected staying there for […]

Wolf Street - A collapse-chart has been making the rounds in the social media, financial blogs, and the like. It’s being handed around without context, as if self-explanatory, sort of like, look, the world is collapsing. It’s from the St. Louis Fed’s data depository. The title of the chart says, among other things, ominously, “Liabilities: Remittances Due to […]

Wolf Street - The overall 11-City Teranet-National Bank House Price Index dropped 0.8% in October from September, and is down 7.7% from the peak in May, the largest five-month drop in the history of the data going back to 1997. It slashed the year-over-year gain to 4.9%, from the 19% range in March and April. Nine of the […]