Did you like this post? Subscribe to my Substack now for additional insights and content. According to the Durable Goods Manufacturers Shipments, Inventories, and Orders report (M3) released today, new orders for durable goods manufacturers increased $1.9 billion (seasonally and inflation adjusted), or 0.7%, to $267.2 billion in May, while new orders for consumer durable goods decreased 0.62% to $42.9 billion.The relationship between consumer confidence and manufacturers' new orders for durable goods is fairly clear, as a decline in consumer confidence typically precedes a collapse in demand for durable goods.Given the historic setback in the University of Michigan Consumer Confidence…
Author: Private Lending Agent
Zombie House Flipping is a television show on A&E that follows a team of renovators and designers as they renovate abandoned “zombie” houses that have been foreclosed on, restoring the properties to their original condition. Neighbors of the zombie houses seem eager for the crew to come and fix them up like there's no tomorrow, and clean up the whole area. With the show still airing on A&E in 2022, fans are all asking the same question: “What happened to Duke in 'Zombie House Flipping?'” So let's take a closer look at Peter Duke and the rest of the show's…
Did you like this post? Subscribe to my Substack now for additional insights and content. I am amazed at how many macroeconomic commentators promote the false notion that quantitative easing does not cause inflation by citing arcane explanations of the Fed's balance sheet, the difference between bank reserves and currency in circulation, the highly structured means by which the Fed conducts QE, or other means that obscure the clear objectives of this unorthodox monetary policy tactic with unnecessary complexity.Let's take a moment to look back at why the Fed began “quantitative easing” in the first place.In the fall of 2008,…
Selling Sunset's Heather Rae Young and her husband, Tarek El Moussa, will be starring in their own home flipping show on HGTV. Heather has extensive real estate experience, gaining experience in the market by appearing alongside Tarek and his children on HGTV's show Flipping 101. The veteran reality star also appeared on Netflix's Selling Sunset for five seasons as a real estate agent with The Oppenheim Group. Heather and Tarek's extensive real estate industry experience makes them the perfect house flipping team. Heather and Tarek have been enjoying newlywed bliss ever since their marriage. The couple tied the knot in…
Did you like this post? Subscribe to my Substack now for additional insights and content. Perhaps the most unique characteristic of humans is our boundless inventiveness. Reading the transcript of Blake Lemoine’s “interview” with LaMDA, Google’s remarkable and possibly sentient AI, makes that perfectly clear, but also highlights how this kind of ingenuity may push the boundaries of our current ability to predict the impact and ultimately the costs of such creativity.Whether or not LaMDA is truly sentient, reading this exchange got me thinking (as a software engineering consultant…my day job) about the great ways in which a service like…
Did you like this post? Subscribe to my Substack now for additional insights and content. It's been so long since we last fought stubborn inflation that many, maybe even most, Americans, including policymakers and central bankers, have forgotten how “unstable” inflation expectations can be and what that really means for the fight ahead.Recently, James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, had this to say about current inflation and potential downside risks:”Current U.S. macroeconomic conditions undermine the Fed's credibility with regard to its inflation targeting,” Bullard said.Bullard said near-term inflation expectations among financial markets, households and businesses…
Did you like this post? Subscribe to my Substack now for additional insights and content. Below is the full text of today's FOMC statement, including my comments.Overall economic activity appears to be recovering after a modest decline in the first quarter. Job gains have been solid in recent months and the unemployment rate remains low. Inflation remains high, reflecting pandemic-related supply-demand imbalances, higher energy prices, and broader price pressures.Sell: While the above is somewhat accurate, there are numerous examples of inflationary headwinds coming from retailer earnings, slowing reported retail sales, historically low consumer confidence, CEO guidance, etc. Additionally, we are…
Did you like this post? Subscribe to my Substack now for additional insights and content. When Ben Bernanke detailed his thoughts about the various causes of the “Great Moderation” to the Eastern Economic Association in 2004 (as a Federal Reserve Governor before becoming Chairman), he had no idea that, ironically, we were on the brink of the beginning of the end of this unique period.The “Great Moderation” is generally defined as a period of reduced volatility during which businesses, households, and institutions could rely on a more stable and predictable macroeconomic environment, and is generally accepted to have begun in…
The Fed is completely backed into a corner, and no amount of Fed optimism or modern financial engineering will change that fact. It's time to act and honestly acknowledge what is really at stake for the economy. The only sensible way forward at this point is for the Fed to meet the challenge head-on and use all of its “tightening” tools to fight inflation. After over 13 years of reckless “easy money” policies and literally encouraging “moral hazard” through bailing out and backstopping markets for more than twice that long (the '87 crash, LTCM, dot com/911, the housing bubble burst,…
Today, as in 2007, the economic zeitgeist is marked by a palpable sense of major headwinds and anxiety about looming disaster.Certainly, the uncertainties and underlying risks that are causing this sense of doom now are very different from the circumstances back then, but every cycle comes with its own challenges and unique stories of why markets go into overdrive and why they revert to the mean.This is certainly a case of history repeating itself: the exact circumstances do not simply repeat themselves, but provide a rough guide that astute observers can utilize to navigate ever-changing market conditions.That being said, there…