The Bowtie Economist's Daily Dose of 70-Word Wisdom

The price of an existing home declined 0.2% Y-o-Y in April. This was the first Y-o-Y price decline since early 2012. However, seasonally adjusted M-o-M prices rose 0.53%, and have now risen for three straight months, after falling for seven…

Compared to 2019, TSA reports airline travel is back to its 2019 level and has been so since the start of 2023. As for hotel occupancy, it’s now equal to the 2000-2022 median, but slightly below the 2018 record. Gasoline…

With 30-year mortgage rates up 1.2 percentage points Y-o-Y, it’s unsurprising that the May national median house price is down 3.1% Y-o-Y to $396,100. The drop was the largest percentage decline since 12/2011, and the fourth month in a row…

The Friday File: Tom Stuker has flown more airline miles than anyone ever, 23 million. His busiest year was 2019 when he took 373 flights that covered 1.46 million miles and averaged eight hours per day on a plane. Had…

In 2022, charitable donations totaled $499 billion, down 3.5% from the 2021 record level of $517 billion. 2022 was only the fourth time since the early 1980s that total donations declined without accounting for inflation. After inflation, charitable giving fell…

If inflation declines from 4% to 3%, as it’s expected to do over the next six months, and the Fed keeps the Fed funds rate at roughly 5.375%, as the Fed is proposing, the real interest rate will rise from…

91.8% of U.S. homeowners with a mortgage have an interest rate below 6%. That’s down from a record high of 92.9% in 22Q2. The tiny decline over the course of a year shows how “rate lock” has frozen existing homeowners…

Be it truckload, less-than-truckload, rail, parcel, etc., shipping activity and costs keep declining. Year-over-year total shipments are down 5.6%, expenditures are down 15.7%, freight rates are down 10.7%, and per mile truck rental costs are down 15.3%. For purposes of…

The Friday File: By scanning publicly available websites, the most popular language on the Internet is English with 55.6% of domains using it. Russian is the second most popular language at 5%, followed by Spanish at 4.9%, German at 4.3%,…

New-lease asking rent growth is plummeting! After rising 14.5% Y-o-Y through last May, new-lease rent increases rose just 2% in 5/23 compared to 5/22, and may well turn negative, something that since the Housing Bust only happened during the first…