Archive for January 2020

The Friday File: Last Sunday, Kobe Bryant, 41, his 13-year-old daughter, and six others were killed in a helicopter crash in LA. Bryant began making history when at 17 he became the youngest NBA player ever. During his 20-year career he was an 18-time All-Star, won five NBA titles, two Olympic gold medals and retired…

US new home sales fell to an annual rate of 694,000 in 12/19; a mildly disappointing end to a dismal decade which saw single-family new-homes sales average just 484,000/year. In the prior decade (2000-2009), single-family sales averaged 901,000, in the 1990s they were 700,000/year, in the 1980s 610,000/year, in the 1970s 656,000/year and in the…

Medical Money From 1998-2017, the cost of medical services doubled, and hospital services tripled; the CPI rose by just 50%. Why? Healthcare bills are paid by third parties like insurance companies and the government. Consumers have no incentive to monitor prices or be cost-conscious. Conversely, price inflation for the 20 most popular cosmetic procedures including…

Rather than fighting regulation, Uber, the ride hailing leader, should embrace it! Uber struggles to make money not due to compliance with rules and regulations but from competition from startups forcing it to compete on price. Uber should graciously agree to regulations — as traffic is too political and pollutive to escape scrutiny — so…

The economic impact of the deadly 2003 SARS outbreak in China knocked 0.5% off annual GDP in Taiwan and Singapore, 1% in China, and 2.5% in Hong Kong. Impacts were negligible in the rest of Asia and trivial elsewhere. While China is much bigger today, the Coronavirus is much less deadly and Chinese containment methods…

The Friday File: Recently, the gameshow Jeopardy! had a tournament featuring only the three highest earning contestants, Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter and James Holtzhauer, with the winner taking home a cool million! The winner was the first player to win three games. Not only did Jennings win, but he won in just four nights! Jennings…

December existing home sales jumped 10.8% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.54 million, best since 2/18. That pushed up existing home sales in CY2019 to 5.344 million, up exactly 1,000 units compared to CY2018! Sales should rise only slightly in 2020. New construction will rise some, but existing sales are increasingly hamstrung by…

The IMF is predicting global growth of just 3.3% in 2020, but that’s up from 2.9% in 2019, the slowest growth since the Great Recession. The improvement is due to aggressive global monetary easing, the US-China trade truce, diminished fears of a no-deal Brexit and an uptick in global trade growth from 1% in 2019…

In 2019, US sales of autos and light trucks totaled 16.9 million. 2019 is the first year since 2014, when sales were 16.5 million, that auto sales fell below 17 million. Sales peaked in 2016 at 17.5 million and have been slowly declining since. As for the world’s largest car market, China, 2019 sales were…

December housing starts jumped an amazing 40.8% Y-o-Y! Single-family rose 29.6% Y-o-Y, while multifamily rose a staggering 74.6% Y-o-Y, although CY2019 starts grew just 3.2% versus CY2018. The December rise is entirely weather related; Midwest starts jumped 85.4% Y-o-Y and in the West 72.7%. Less weather-dependent permits rose slightly, while activity at utilities plummeted 5.6%…