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”
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).
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?”
We wrote about three slightly different U.S. recession indicators that have been predictive of the past few recessions and have been tracking how near or far are those from being invoked, here’s where we are at the end of 2018,
Records are being broken shattered …
Continue reading “The U.S. equity market meltdown in numbers”
The fiscal situation in the United States is worsening as government debt piles up. The U.S. government (Federal, state and local combined) now spends $1.24 for every $1 in income.
Continue reading “The U.S. Government is now spending $1.24 for every $1 in income”
We look back at 2018 year end S&P 500 targets as 2018 draws to a close. The S&P 500 is currently down about 3% year to date and unless something drastic happens almost every major Wall Street strategist will be way off with their target for the S&P 500 for 2018. We also look at 2019 targets which are all bullish again. Will the predictions for 2019 be any better on target than they were for 2018?
We will write about the current U.S. fiscal situation in depth later during the month but in the meanwhile here is the story in some graphs.
The total Federal debt (doesn’t include individual state debt) now stands at $21.52 trillion,
Continue reading “The current U.S. fiscal situation in graphs”