Believe it or not, today is the first “night” of spring, as the Spring Equinox happens late this evening. This means that we are almost through the first quarter of the year. Spring is especially important not only because of the nice weather and the flowers, but also because it is prime real estate season. […]
Read More
February 13, 2024 We have seen so many words describing our economic climate during the past few years. Words/phrases such as soft-landing, stagflation, sticky inflation, recession, qualitative tightening and more. There are so many that it is hard to keep up with the nomenclature. This week, we would like to bring one more to the […]
Read More
February 13, 2024 The Federal Reserve has been quite busy this decade. We started this decade with an economy-halting pandemic in March of 2020. The Fed reacted quickly, pushing short-term rates to zero, as well as adding significant qualitative stimulus in the form of purchasing treasuries and mortgages, further pushing down long-term interest rates as […]
Read More
February 6, 2024 The triple whammy of economic data has been released during the past two weeks. The question is—how did we do overall? We have already reported that economic growth for the 4th quarter came in at an estimated 3.3%, which puts the annual rate at around 3.1% before 4th quarter revisions. Overall, a […]
Read More
January 9, 2024 Want to know how strong the economy will be in 2024? Well, it is all about jobs. A healthy economy creates more jobs and the more jobs created, the healthier the economy becomes because those with jobs spend more every month. In 2023, the economy was predicted to evolve into a recession. […]
Read More
December 26, 2023 And so ends another year. While challenging from a real estate perspective, the year has been quite extraordinary. Conventional wisdom would have put our economy into recession after the Federal Reserve proceeded to raise interest rates eleven times from March of 2022 to July of 2023. Yet the economy continued creating a […]
Read More
December 19, 2023 We have had plenty of false starts during the past 18 months or so. Periods in which interest rates either paused or even dropped a little. The latest movement in the right direction seems to not only have lasted longer than most periods, but also has been accompanied by encouraging data on […]
Read More
December 12, 2023 Today is the last meeting of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee. Well, for the year anyway. Though technically, the Fed can call an emergency session at any time if a crisis takes place. For example, the “Black Monday” stock market crash of October of 1987. There were emergency rate cuts in […]
Read More
November 21, 2023 This week we will celebrate Thanksgiving. As is tradition, we will count the ways in which we should be thankful – no matter how challenging the year has been! From a personal perspective, we hope that you all have had a great year. From a business perspective, it is probably easier this […]
Read More