The Friday File: Across all 50 states, vanilla is the signature ice cream flavor in 19. Coffee’s second at 7, rocky road follows at 5, then peanut butter at 4; mint chocolate chip and butter pecan are at 3. Tied…
Existing home sales in September were down 2.2% Y-o-Y, but that masks large performance differences across prices. Sales of homes under $100,000 fell a substantial 8.4%. Homes that sold between $100,000 and $250,000 declined 7.2%, homes $250,000-$500,000 fell 2.9%, and…
Today’s CPI reading was lousy. M-o-M headline inflation jumped 0.6%, up from 0.4% last month; Y-o-Y headline inflation rose to 3.7%, up from 3.4% last month. Both M-o-M and Y-o-Y core inflation readings were up, and unlike headline, by more…
Econo The 2026 Nobel Prize in economics has been awarded to Americans Robert Hall of Stanford and Michael Woodford of Columbia. Their primary contribution was to rebuild macroeconomics based on microeconomic foundations/data. Rather than looking at macro data to guide…
Dating back to the midterm elections of 1954, in 16 of the past 19 midterm election years the S&P 500 posted positive returns in the 4th quarter, with an average gain of 6.6%. The best gain was 20.9% in 98Q4,…
The Friday File: While autonomous AI agents like Meta’s recently released Muse are interesting, I am especially looking forward to an AI agent (Cash Concierge?) that focuses on getting me the highest rate of return on my personal/business cash balances.…
In 2015, the share of car loans that had a term of 72+ months was 15%. By Covid’s arrival the percentage was 20%. By 2022 it had risen to 25%, where the rate stayed through 2025. However, it’s again rising…
US equity market performance is increasingly being led by the Magnificent Seven including the hyperscalers (Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft) plus Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla. They closed yesterday with a combined market cap of almost $25 trillion, 77% of US…
Recently revised data showed 26Q1 annualized U.S. GDP growth at 2.5%, up from 2.1%, and 26Q2 at 2.2%, up from 1.5%. These upward revisions to consumer spending and investment, which includes construction, emphasize how critical the AI buildout has been.…
September net job growth was 29,000, while July/August was collectively revised down 60,000. Since 1/25, average job growth/month has been 34,667, making this month’s number more evidence of the new normal. With the current immigration policies, there’s no reason to…