<Click on chart for larger image> Zero Hedge (Blog) – Mortgage Applications Plunging At Fastest Rate In 4 Years; Refis Down 57% With a number of banks cutting their mortgage departments (Wells Fargo JV and Everbank most recently), it seems the ‘weakness’ in the housing recovery may be more than transitory. For the 11th week… Continue reading Mortgage Refis, Purchases Fall
MoneyBeat (WSJ Blog) – Stock Market’s Dark Side Expands to More Than 3-Year High In July Stock trading activity on private, electronic venues like “dark pools” reached its highest level in more than three years in July – and by some measures its highest level ever. About 37.1% of all U.S.-listed shares this month were… Continue reading Dark Pool Trading On The Rise
Charts of the Week Topics Covered This Week Include: Earnings Season At The Halfway Point Earnings Season At The Halfway Point – 2 Stock Market Correlation European Deposits Market Cap As A % Of GDP Home Prices Continue To Rise Rent Rate vs Homeownership Rate S&P 500 Homebuilding Index Money Markets And European Banks Stocks… Continue reading Charts of the Week
Comment Jon Hilsenrath was on CNBC last night. We believe he made news and most missed it. We believe he said a September taper might not happen. He said the following in the video above (starting at 6:00): Hilsenrath: I think whatever they say about the future of bond buying, yes, the onus is on… Continue reading Will A September Taper Really Happen?
The Wall Street Journal- U.S. Economy Grows Faster Than Expected The U.S. economy picked up slightly in the second quarter of the year, though the overall pace of growth remained lackluster as consumers held back and the federal government continued to cut spending. The nation’s gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services… Continue reading Market Capitalization As A Percentage Of GDP
The Financial Times – White House hails benefits of ‘Obamacare’ … It also predicted that a forthcoming jobs report, which it said would probably show a big rise in part-time workers, would not be a reflection of employers dumping employees’ hours because of new mandates under the law, as some critics have suggested. Instead, the… Continue reading Did The White House Leak The Payroll Report Two Days Ago?
<Click on chart for larger image> The New York Times – Home Prices Jumped 12.2% in May Home prices jumped 12.2 percent in May compared with a year earlier, the biggest annual gain since March 2006. The increase shows the housing recovery is strengthening. The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index released on Tuesday… Continue reading Home Prices Continue To Rise
<Click on chart for larger image> <Click on chart for larger image> Zero Hedge – US Rents Hit Record Highs As Homeownership Plunges To 18 Year Lows The American Homeownership Dream is officially dead. Long live the New Normal American Dream: Renting. According to the latest quarterly homeownership data released by the Census Bureau, the… Continue reading Rents Rise, Homeownership Rate Falls
The Wall Street Journal – The Stock Market Beats GDP as an Economic Bellwether On Wednesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis releases its estimates of U.S. gross domestic product for the second quarter of the year. The BEA bureau cautions that its numbers are estimates and are subject to significant revision. The reality is that… Continue reading The Stock Market vs GDP
Zero Hedge (blog) – Lakshman Achuthan: The US Entered Recession Last Year And “Is Worse Than Japan In the 90s” Despite Tom Keene’s best efforts to appear fair-and-balanced, this brief interview on Bloomberg TV places ECRI’s Lakshman Achuthan in the uncomfortable position of destroying every propagandized ‘fact’ that the mainstream media is entrusted with disseminating… Continue reading Are We In Recession Now?
Bloomberg.com – Following Bernanke Means Using Precedent of Unprecedented Policy The success of the next Federal Reserve chairman, be it Janet Yellen, Lawrence Summers or someone else, will depend less on their grounding in monetary policy orthodoxy than on their readiness to reach beyond it. That flexibility defines the leaders of the world’s principal central… Continue reading The FOMC’s Unprecedented Policy