Archive for June 2024

The Friday File: The most visited museum in the world is the Louvre in Paris with 8.86 million visitors in 2023, down from 9.6 million in 2019. In second, the Vatican Museums at 6.76 million, then the British Museum with 5.80 million visitors. NYC’s Metropolitan Museum is 5th with 5.36 million entrants. The most popular…

In 2000, the percentage of foreign exchange reserves held by governments in dollars was 71%. Today it’s 60%. Oddly, Euro/yen/pound holdings are virtually unchanged at 31%. China accounts for 25% of the shift from the dollar, largely due to Russia. Most of the shift is due to rising holdings of Australian, Canadian, South Korean, and…

Perhaps the key reason surveys of consumer sentiment are so lousy is the impact of inflation, or more accurately the cumulative rise in prices from 2021. What gets lost is even though real wages fell behind inflation in 2021 and 2022, for almost two years average wages have been gaining on inflation, and real wages…

May housing starts were 1.277 million annualized, down 19.3% YoY and at their lowest since 6/20. Multifamily starts fell a whopping 52% Y-o-Y, single-family starts were off just 1.7% Y-o-Y but are down three months in a row for the first time since early 2023 and at their lowest level since 10/23. Moreover, single-family permits…

The CBO now projects the FY2024 deficit at 6.7% of GDP, up from 5.3% in February. Through 2034, revenues are expected to be around their 1974-2023 average of 17.3% of GDP, but spending is projected to be 24% of GDP, well above the historic 21%. The deficit will explode to over 6%/annum, well above the…

The Friday File: Among fast casual hamburger chains, Five Guys is most expensive at over $9/cheese burger, followed by Shake Shack and Smashburger at $7. With fries, Five Guys approaches $15, Shack Shake is over $11, and Smashburger just over $10. Among fast food chains, Burger King leads at over $6, followed by Wendy’s at…

Somewhat counterintuitively, medical procedure price transparency appears to slightly raise prices. Transparency does not impact the quality of service, and most critically and quite troublingly, does not increase consumer price shopping. This result of higher prices is strongest for low-cost providers with low out-of-network spending. This suggests that transparency provides more pricing information to providers,…

During the Tech craze peak, the equity share of household assets was almost 32%. Today it’s 34%. Similarly, the equity share of household financial assets has risen from a peak of 45% during the dotcom boom to 50% today. Moreover, the median household now has a staggering $140,000 of equity holdings. When the next bear…

In a move both totally expected and utterly shocking, Nvidia’s shares gained 3.2% in mid-day trading, boosting its market capitalization to $3.33 trillion, edging ahead of Microsoft at $3.32 trillion, and Apple at $3.28 trillion. To put this into perspective, these three firms would comfortably be the world’s third largest stock exchange, behind the NYSE…

There is some talk of replacing 100% of income tax revenue with tariffs on foreign goods entering the US. This will be hard to do. In FY2023 corporate and individual income taxes totaled $2.6 trillion, excluding payroll taxes. Total imports in FY2023 were $3.8 trillion. To raise enough money the average tariff on imports would…