With the 10-year Treasury at 2.8%, based on historical relationships, a 30-year conventional mortgage should have a rate of 4.5%, however, it’s now over 5%! I suspect that this is because investors expect the Fed to keep raising rates. Given…
The Friday File: Looking at tax burden – the proportion of personal income paid towards state and local taxes – NY has the highest burden at 12.75%, followed by HI at 12.70%, ME at 11.42%, VT at 11.13%, and MN…
Historically, new home construction and auto sales were generally good indicators of the economic health of households. Now, less so. With supply-chains a mess, input prices up dramatically, and labor in short supply, lower-priced product is not much being made,…
Chair Powell points out that in 1965, 1984, and 1994, the Fed raised rates and a recession didn’t ensue. However, in all those cases the Fed was pre-emptive and was trying to prevent inflation from rising. Now they need to…
While inflation is more pronounced in the USA at roughly 8%, it’s now over 5% in 58% of advanced economies, and over 7% in 55% of emerging economies. Even excluding energy, inflation has increased widely. This suggests that both rounds…
For the week ending 4/2/22, the number of first-time claims for unemployment, a proxy for layoffs, was a remarkable 166,000, the lowest level since the week ending 11/30/68, well over 50 years ago, when the US population was 60% of…
The Friday File: Viewership of the Oscars peaked in 1998 at 55 million. It then held steady at 40 million through 2015, then collapsed, bottoming at 10 million last year and recovering to 16.6 million last week. But the real…
Among the ten US cities with the highest current office occupancy rates, the average rate through mid-March is 39.50%, equal to what it was before Omicron pushed it down to slightly below 20%. Returning to 100%, where it was pre-Covid-19…
At the peak in 1949, 78.8% of households contained married couples. By 2021, that percentage had declined to 47.3%. Simultaneously, single-person households rose from 3.8% in 1960 to 11.1% in 2021. Relatedly, age at first marriage bottomed in 1956 at…