August 20, 2024 The war on inflation has been a long-drawn-out affair. From a low of 1.23% during the height of the pandemic in 2020, inflation rose to 4.71% in 2022 and peaked at 8.00% in 2022. During the past 12 months, inflation has averaged approximately 3.0%, a drop of over 100% from the peak […]
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August 13, 2024 At the very beginning of the year, we discussed factors that would affect the markets and interest rates in 2024. There were plenty of factors to discuss—from economic growth to the progress against inflation. Most of those factors were “up in the air” – for example, we had no idea how long […]
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August 6, 2024 We have a very busy few weeks of economic news. While the stock market was reaching record highs in July, the month closed with some important news. As July came to a close, the initial reading of economic growth for the second quarter was released. The 2.8% growth rate was seen as […]
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July 30, 2024 For most of last year, it was apparent that the Federal Reserve wanted the economy to stop growing so fast. Though you would never hear them say that they were trying to force us into a recession, certainly forecasters were predicting a recession. But the recession never came as the economy and […]
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July 23, 2024 A few months ago, we delineated the reasons that listings would start to grow after several years of real estate purchase prospects not being able to find a house. These reasons included long-term demographic factors such as baby boomers wanting to age in place, but finally aging out of their homes. They […]
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July 2, 2024 In the interest of seeing lower interest rates, we have had some hits and misses in the past few months. Two months ago, we had a moderate jobs report, but stronger than expected inflation numbers. Last month we had a strong jobs report but weaker than expected inflation numbers. Thus, we now […]
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June 25, 2024 The Federal Reserve Board has always been very careful regarding making public statements that will affect the markets. As a matter of fact, in years past the Fed was much more clandestine regarding their opinions to avoid roiling investors. So much so that there were complaints about the Fed not being open […]
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June 18, 2024 Last week we had a meeting of the Federal Reserve Board’s Open Market Committee and the release of the latest inflation data. Curious about the direction of interest rates? These two events represent bellwethers in this regard. We are looking to the Fed for signals as to when they might take their […]
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June 11, 2024 As we pointed out last week, this is a very busy period for consequential economic news. First, we had the jobs report this past Friday. This report took on additional importance after we finally had more moderate jobs growth in April. So how did we do in May? The economy created 277,000 […]
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