Morning Report: New home sales fall

Posted on August 23, 2019 by Brent Nyitray

Vital Statistics:

 

Last Change
S&P futures 2907 -14.5
Oil (WTI) 53.79 -1.64
10 year government bond yield 1.61%
30 year fixed rate mortgage 3.86%

 

Stocks are lower as we await Jerome Powell’s speech in Jackson Hole. Bonds and MBS are flat.

 

Jerome Powell speaks at 10:00 am, while the markets are looking to see if the Fed trims its sails to what the Fed Funds futures are saying. Some at the Fed have been throwing cold water on the idea that we have entered an easing cycle, but in an era of negative sovereign yields worldwide the die is probably cast for lower rates regardless of what the Fed does.

 

New Home Sales fell to 635,000 from an upwardly-revised 728,000 in June. They are up over 4% from a year ago.

 

new home sales

 

The Conference Board Index of Leading Economic Indicators improved last month. “The US LEI increased in July, following back-to-back modest declines. Housing permits, unemployment insurance claims, stock prices and the Leading Credit Index were the major drivers of the improvement,” said Ataman Ozyildirim, Senior Director of Economic Research at The Conference Board. “However, the manufacturing sector continues exhibiting signs of weakness and the yield spread was negative for a second consecutive month. While the LEI suggests the US economy will continue to expand in the second half of 2019, it is likely to do so at a moderate pace.”

 

Note that China imposed additional tariffs on $75 billion of US goods overnight. The tariffs would apply to soybeans, small aircraft, and crude oil.

Filed under: Economy, Morning Report |

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23 Responses

  1. jnc4p, on August 23, 2019 at 12:28 pm said:

    Worth noting:

    “Now comes a proposed K-12 curriculum in California that would enforce these new orthodoxies on the high-school population. It would teach kids in an ethnic studies course how to “critique [sic] empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism and other forms of power and oppression.” The aim is to “connect ourselves to past and contemporary resistance movements that struggle for social justice.” Children will learn to spell women as “womxn,” and be versed in what critical race theorists call “misgynoir.”

    Now, one might expect New York Times reporters to believe that “racism and white supremacy [are] the foundation of all of the systems in the country,” but you can choose not to buy the Times. Public schools? Mandatory. This is where the real action is in “reframing” the entire idea of America.”

    http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/andrew-sullivan-president-trump-never-gets-any-less-absurd.html

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    • Brent Nyitray, on August 23, 2019 at 2:17 pm said:

      Thank god my son will never take an ethnic studies class in high school. He will be taking an extra math or science class.

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    • markinaustin, on August 23, 2019 at 2:41 pm said:

      One must hope that the proposed mandatory reframing is summarily disposed of, quicker than you can say “buy Greenland.”

      Austin ISD is seriously thinking of tracking my twins’ outstanding elementary school out of the best middle school in the city to the worst one in order to bring up the overall scores of the bad middle school and escape funding consequences for a “failing school”. If this happens the girls will end up in magnets or charters, as will half their peers from their elementary school, thus destroying the District’s stupid plan the hard way.

      The girls might have ended up in magnets or charters anyway for middle school, but the current middle school assignment is to one engaged in the middle school year IB curriculum that would have them at one year of college completion out of HS. They have been in pre IB since kindergarten. The proposed MS of course has no such curriculum, which would set these kids back when they enter an IB HS, which they are still scheduled for. The current MS has excess seats, the proposed one does not.

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    • Kevin S. Willis, on August 23, 2019 at 8:08 pm said:

      California wants to commit suicide. It’s frickin’ bizarre.

      But text-book companies will make materials that say whatever the state wants. They just want that money.

      Hope they also teach these kids how to code.

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  2. jnc4p, on August 24, 2019 at 9:27 am said:

    This looks great:

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    • Brent Nyitray, on August 25, 2019 at 12:19 pm said:

      If we ever get genocide again, it will come from the left and it will be under the guise of saving the planet and killing people using social justice considerations to determine who has to die…

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  6. ScottC, on August 25, 2019 at 12:16 pm said:

    This morning I watched ESPN’s new special celebrating 150 years of college football, called Football Is Us: The College Game. . Given what ESPN has become, I suppose it was not a surprise that a good part of the special was dedicated to the history of race and segregation in college football, especially in the south during the 1950s and 60s. The segment, however was ultimately a good demonstration of the fundamental incoherence of the racial grievance industry’s need to maintain a victim mentality regardless of the circumstance.

    The show details how northern schools, in particular Michigan, began to become more competitive once they were willing to recruit black talent, and how southern schools like Alabama suffered in their attempt to maintain segregation. By the late sixties and early seventies, the segregated schools realized that they had to change in order to remain competitive, and so started to recruit and accept more black players. And when Alabama, which as late as 1969 still had an all-white team, won its 6th national championship in 1979, 40% of its starting team was black.

    So, despite the troubling history, this should ultimately be a success story for integration and racial equality, and something to ultimately celebrate, right? No, of course not, because with all the traditional powerhouses willing now to recruit blacks, this meant the end to programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). See, as long as segregation existed, all the best black players were limited in their options, and so HBCUs flourished, pumping out lots of talented players that would go on to play int he NFL. But with the likes of Texas and Alabama, not to mention the Michigans and Notre Dames, recruiting all the best black players, HBCUs just couldn’t compete for players anymore. And this is apparently a Very Sad Thing because, even thought it is really, really bad and condemnable that there might be white-only college football teams, it is at the same time really, really good and celebratory that there might be black-only football teams.

    Far worse, however, than the demise of HBCU football programs, was the fact that integration had occurred, and HBCU programs had been decimated, not for any inherently good reason, but rather in order to strengthen the existing white power structure.

    Lest you think I exaggerate, this is how ESPN ended the segment on race:

    Since the decline of HBCUs, college football has come to be dominated by fomerly all-white schools of the south. Twelve of the last thirteen national champions are from the south. And the Irony is, it’s all been accomplished with players they resisted allowing in for so long.

    [NYT columnist William Rhoden]: “It’s gonna be black labor, and white wealth. We’re going to take your best, your most valuable people, and put them into our institutions, to make us stronger, and at the same time, make yours crumble. And that became the model of integration.”

    So segregation was an outrage, but so, apparently, was integration. It boggles the mind.

    (As an aside, read that take from Rhoden again, in which he divides the college landscape up into “yours” and “ours”, meaning of course black and white. And Trump is responsible for sowing division? YMBFKM)

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  8. Let the mutherfuker burn!, on August 25, 2019 at 4:06 pm said:

    Invading other countries for Gaia.

    If there were a functioning global community, it would be wrestling with how to more aggressively save the Amazon, and acknowledging that the battle against climate change demands not only new international cooperation but, perhaps, the weakening of traditional concepts of the nation-state. The European Union or a coalition of nations should, at least, mull sending planes or firefighters to extinguish the flames, even if Bolsonaro rejects their presence. Admittedly, that might not be practical or might exacerbate the problem. But the case for territorial incursion in the Amazon is far stronger than the justifications for most war. In the meantime, the planet chokes on old notions of sovereignty.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/amazon-fires-show-limits-sovereignty/596779/

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Be kind, show respect, and all will be right with the world.