Why wouldn’t it be?
The Federal Reserve increased the target for the bank’s benchmark rate by 0.25% (to a range of 2.25% to 2.5%) at the end of December, the ninth rate rise since 2015. Rising benchmark interest rates are having little impact on mortgage and saving rates or interest margin of banks.
Interest Margin of Banks in the United States stood at 3.33% at the end of Q3 2018, up just 0.03% from Q2 2018 (3.3%) and up just 0.18% from Q3 2017 (3.15%).
A U.S. recession is always preceded by falling corporate profits so growing corporate profitability is a good (leading) indicator that a U.S. recession is not here (yet) …
Continue reading “U.S. Corporate profits have been growing well and have hit a record high”
We asked the question whether the economic winter was upon us in November. The global economy was already cooling back then but have things further deteriorated?
Continue reading “Did the global economy slow significantly at the end of 2018?”
Household credit growth has been slowing around most of the world including the United States, Canada and Australia but remains robust in the United Kingdom despite economic concerns around Brexit. Household debt excluding student loans has hit 80% of GDP and including student loans has hit 90% of GDP.
Some 16.2 million people now work in the Healthcare sector in the United States. Healthcare has displaced Retail as the largest employer in the United States and has been the biggest job creator since the 1990s. 10.8% of all nonfarm jobs are now in healthcare. Here’s a graph of the growth of healthcare jobs,
Continue reading “Healthcare has displaced Retail as the largest employer in the United States”
At the outset, we wish you a Happy New Year!
Today, the 3rd of January has been a record day every year (for at least the last 15 years) for several things. For starters you have online returns (in the U.S. and the U.K.), gym memberships and dating website(s) signups peaking on the day. But this year is different so expect the unexpected. We can’t write about everything today but cover four topics (Retail, Technology, Interest Rates and Debt).
Here are our ten recommended reads from 2018 (our first year in existence). These are different from the ten most read in 2018. Many of these didn’t make it to the top 10 most read as they got published late during the year. Here are our picks from 2018,
Here are the ten most read posts from 2018 (our first year in existence). Some surprises in there …
December was very volatile for the markets and 2018 turned out to be the worst year for the markets since the financial crisis of 2008. Globally, equity markets were down everywhere other than some exceptions like in India, the UAE and New Zealand.
Just three charts hold the answer …
We wrote earlier during the year that U.S. consumer and commercial debt hit record highs but charge-off and delinquency rates remained at low levels. We will write about bad loans by each product again in the new year but meanwhile just three charts hold the answer to the question on whether bad loans are really increasing for banks in the United States.
Continue reading “Are bad loans really increasing for banks in the United States?”