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 […]

Wolf Street - Sales of all types of previously owned homes – houses, condos, and co-ops – fell by 5.9% in October from September, the ninth month in a row of declines, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of sales of 4.43 million homes, just a hair above the lockdown-month of April 2020, according to the National Association […]

Wolf Street - The Bank of Canada hiked the target for its overnight rate for the sixth time in a row, today by 50 basis points, to 3.75%, the highest since 2008, following the 75-basis-point hike in September and the 100-basis-point hike in July. Since it started the rate-hike cycle in March, the BOC has jacked up its rate […]

Wolf Street - anada’s housing market is trying to figure out where reality is? After the era of ridiculous house-price spikes, triggered by the Bank of Canada’s interest rate repression and QE, the BoC now gets to grapple with raging inflation by hiking interest rates and shedding assets (QT), which has been pushing up mortgage rates, which renders […]

Wolf Street - Traffic of prospective buyers of new single-family houses plunged to the lowest since 2012, excluding the two lockdown months April and May, and is now approaching even the levels of those two lockdown months, according to data today from the National Association of Home Builders. The NAHB index for traffic of prospective buyers dropped to […]

Wolf Street - Nearly two-thirds of consumer spending goes to services. And they’re now the driver of inflation. The CPI for services spiked in September for the 13th month in a row, and by the most since 1982, and it accelerated month-to-month. Housing costs spiked, but also all kinds of other services, such as health insurance (+2.1% month-to-month […]

Wolf Street - In the week ended September 30, demand for mortgages to purchase a home plunged by 13%, seasonally adjusted, from the already beaten-down levels in the prior week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association today. Compared to the same week last year, purchase mortgage applications dropped by 37%. They fell through the lows during the lockdowns […]

Wolf Street - Amazon, which booked net losses in Q1 and Q2 totaling nearly $6 billion and whose shares are down 38% from their high in July last year, is undertaking large-scale efforts to cut costs – including commercial real estate costs. It is closing or cancelling 44 warehouses across the US; it’s halting construction on six office […]

Wolf Street - In Hamilton, Ontario, after a ridiculous mind-bending spike, prices plunged 5.8% in August from July, and are down 10.5% in three months. In Toronto, prices plunged 4.0% in August from July, and are down 8.3% in three months. In Vancouver, prices dropped by 2.0% in August from July; in Ottawa by 3.1% in August; in […]

Wolf Street - “Buyer traffic is weak in many markets as more consumers remain on the sidelines due to high mortgage rates and home prices that are putting a new home purchase out of financial reach for many households,” according to the National Association of Home Builders this morning regarding its survey of home builders. Incentives: “In another […]

Wolf Street - Over the four weeks through September 9, gasoline consumption dropped by 11.7% from the same four-week period in 2019, to 8.56 million barrels per day on average, below the same periods in 2020 and 2021, according to EIA data today. The EIA measures gasoline consumption in terms of barrels supplied to the market by refiners, […]

Wolf Street - The Bank of Canada hiked the target for its overnight rate for the fifth time in a row, today by 75 basis points, to 3.25%, the highest since 2008, following the 100-basis-point monster hike at the last meeting, which got everyone’s attention. In the statement, the BoC said that its policy interest rate “will need […]

Wolf Street - On the Bank of Canada’s balance sheet released Friday, total assets of C$439 billion were down by 24% from the peak in March 2021 (C$575 billion). By comparison, the Fed’s balance sheet peaked in April 2022. The BoC’s Quantitative Tightening (QT) started in essence in April 2021 and is way ahead of the Fed’s QT. […]

Wolf Street - The plunge in home sales is just stunning. Sales of new single-family houses collapsed by 12.6% in July from the already beaten-down levels in June, and by nearly 30% from July last year, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 511,000 houses, the lowest since January 2016, and well below the lockdown lows, according to […]

Wolf Street - Inventory and supply of previously-owned homes of all types – single-family houses, condos, co-ops, and townhouses – surged, and sales plunged, amid sky-high prices that have been made impossible by 5%-plus holy-moly mortgage rates. And so the red-hot housing market turns into a “housing recession,” as the National Association of Realtors called it today, after […]

Wolf Street - It wasn’t the hottest growth in jobs ever, but it was big and exceeded the pre-pandemic average job growth. Employers added 528,000 workers to their payrolls in July, and 2.79 million over the past three months. Wages jumped, but less than raging inflation, and the number of unemployed people actively looking for work fell to […]

Wolf Street - Signs are now everywhere that the crazy housing market is turning the corner. Earlier today the Census Bureau reported some chilling data on new house sales and prices, which plunged in June, as inventory surged to the highest since 2008. The National Association of Realtors reported last week that existing home sales in June also […]

Wolf Street - Homebuilders have struggled for well over a year with supply and labor shortages and ridiculously spiking costs. In addition, this year, the new holy-moly mortgage rates added to the woes, and unsold inventories surged to levels not seen since 2008, as sales fell. And homebuilder stocks have gotten hammered across the board, down year-to-date between […]

Wolf Street - “To front-load the path to higher interest rates,” the Bank of Canada today jacked up its main rate by a 100 basis points to 2.5%, the fourth rate hike in a row, and the biggest rate hike since 1998, which made the BoC the first of the G-7 central banks to raise by 100 basis […]

Wolf Street - Automakers have now reported their June new vehicle sales, or their Q2 new vehicle sales, for the US, except Tesla, which doesn’t report US sales but only global sales. All automakers, even Toyota, and now even Tesla, are struggling with the ongoing semiconductor shortages, and they started the month of June with desperately low inventories […]

Wolf Street - The first “deceleration” and “signs of a tipping point” cropped up in the S&P CoreLogic Home Price Index, which was released today. But today’s data for “April” consists of the three-month average of closed home sales that were entered into public records in February, March, and April,  representing deals that were made a few weeks […]

Wolf Street - When Canada’s Consumer Price Index for May was released a couple of days ago, it was – “as expected,” I would say – a lot lot worse than expected, and exceeded once again by a huge margin the inflation forecasts by the Bank of Canada. According to the exasperated economists at the National Bank of […]

Wolf Street - Inventories of new vehicles at dealers are still desperately short, even as sales have plunged due to vehicle shortages. That has been a given now for over a year, and it hasn’t gotten better, and depending on who is talking, it might get a little better, or it might get worse, if that’s even possible. […]