70 Words

The Friday File: Prior to this Olympics, only five athletes had won Olympic medals in both the summer and winter games, including two men and three women, two of which are Americans. With the USA men in the gold medal…

Earlier this week, the 165th million American was fully vaccinated, lifting the overall US vaccination rate to 50%, and the percentage of Americans over 18 to 70%. Prior to the very contagious Delta variant, herd immunity was thought to occur…

As government stimulus slowly fades, the personal savings rate has generally declined from a one-month peak of 33.8% in 4/20 to the current rate of 9.4%, slightly above the pre-covid rate of 7.5%. This suggests that the abnormal addition to…

Inflation, as calculated by the Fed’s favorite measure Core-PCE, was 3.54% Y-o-Y in June, up just marginally from 3.44% in May, suggesting that Peak Inflation is probably here. A key reason inflation isn’t worse, unlike other recessions there’s little pent-up…

Having now seen the 21Q2 GDP data and June household income and spending data, my initial estimate (please don’t call it a guess) of 21Q3 GDP is 6.5%. It could go as high as 9% or as low as 4%.…

The Friday File: While the most expensive summer Olympic games ever held are the current Tokyo games at $25 billion (in inflation-adjusted dollars), they are also the summer games with the 4th highest cost overrun, 266%. The bronze medalists in…

Following yesterday’s meeting, the Fed suggested that tapering of its monthly purchases of Treasuries and MBS could begin as early as fall. But, with this morning’s softer than expected 21Q3 GDP growth number of 6.5% as opposed to the 8.5%…

After instantaneously falling to 5%, the percentage of persons working in an office building slowly rose to 20% by late 10/20. It then reversed and steadily fell to just 10% by Christmas. Since, it’s consistently risen and is now 25%.…

June new home sales came in at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of just 676,000/year, and May was revised sharply down. As recently as 1/21 sales were 993,000/year but have fallen sharply and are now below their pre-Covid-19 run rate.…

Since mid-March, the rate on the 10-year Treasury bond has eased from 1.74% to just 1.30%, despite rising inflation. Partly it’s Fed Chair Powell’s consistent message that inflation is transitory, but there’s more. Monetary stimulus is expected to be removed…