Tag: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Biden-Harris Admin Adds Nearly No Jobs in Last Report Before Election

Daily Caller News Foundation
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The U.S. added 12,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in October as the unemployment rate remained unchanged, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data released Friday.

Economists expected 110,000 jobs to be added in October, far lower than the initially reported 254,000 job gain in September, and that the unemployment rate would hold steady at 4.1%. Previously reported job gains for August and September were revised down by 81,000 and 31,000, respectively, following a trend under the Biden-Harris administration of overestimating employment growth in initial estimates, with the cumulative number of new jobs reported in 2023 roughly 1.3 million less than previously thought.

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Home Sales Drop in March as Mortgage Rates Surge over 7 Percent

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Existing home sales shrank in March as consumers respond to continuing price increases and rising mortgage rates.

Sales for existing homes fell 4.3% in March compared to the previous month and 3.7% year-over-year, to an annual rate of 4.19 million, according to a press release from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). The average for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage reached 7.10% this week, a substantial jump from 6.88% last week, depressing Americans’ desire to switch homes and possibly acquire a higher interest rate, according to a release from real estate giant Freddie Mac.

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Government Releases Another Batch of Data That Wipes Out Previous Economic Gains

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New orders for manufactured durable goods, which serve as an indicator for longer-term investments from businesses and consumers, had a huge downward revision for January, following similar revisions seen in jobs data.

Orders for durable goods increased 1.4 percent in February to $277.9 billion, but January’s gains were revised down to -6.9 percent from an initial estimate of -6.1 percent, taking a huge chunk out of previously reported gains, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The revisions for durable goods orders mirror revisions in employment figures, which have repeatedly reported high growth figures that are later revised down, most recently being revised down for January by 124,000 while job growth for February was reported as 275,000.

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Home Prices Hit New High In Nine Month Climb as Affordability Tumbles

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U.S. home prices climbed to their highest point ever in October alongside nearly 8 percent mortgage rates, fueling home unaffordability for average Americans, according to data released Tuesday by S&P Global.

The Case-Shiller home price index, which measures home prices in 20 major metro markets, rose by 0.6 percent for the month of October when seasonally adjusted, or 4.8 percent year-over-year, higher than the 4 percent seen in the previous month, according to a release from S&P Global. The month-to-month growth resulted in the highest level of home prices in U.S. history, following nine months of consecutive increases.

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Proposed Banking Regulations Won’t Save Sector But Will Hurt Your Wallet, Experts Warn

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The Senate Banking Oversight Committee met with top U.S. bank CEOs on Wednesday about the possible effects of new regulations, proposed in July, that would raise capital requirements, titled Basel III endgame, according to CNBC. The new restrictions would not tackle problems that caused the most recent banking crisis earlier this year and would disproportionately affect smaller borrowers, like average Americans, by tightening credit conditions and restricting access to affordable debt in the form of mortgages, credit cards and more, experts told the DCNF.

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Americans Are Burning Through Savings to Keep Biden’s Economy Afloat, Experts Say

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Under President Joe Biden, economic growth has been partly sustained by Americans spending through their savings on everyday goods, according to experts who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of economic growth, has remained persistently high, coming in at 2.1 percent for the second quarter of 2023, even as the Federal Reserve has attempted to tame growth through hikes of its federal funds rate. The main contributor to U.S. GDP is consumer spending, which has managed to notch consistent increases at the expense of the savings of average Americans, experts told the DCNF.

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Runaway Inflation ‘Unlikely’ to be Reeled in Under Biden Administration, Experts Say

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by Will Kessler   As long as President Joe Biden continues his high government spending policies, inflation is not likely to return to previously normal levels without seeing economic repercussions, according to experts who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation. The last time the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a measure of inflation, was below 3 percent year-over-year was in March 2021, two months after Biden took office, with the CPI last measuring at 3.7 percent for September, despite the Federal Reserve’s inflation target being just 2 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. To return to the Fed’s target, which was common in the decade preceding Biden without difficulty or economic repercussions, the president would have to give up his high-spending policies that have been a signature of his economic policy, according to experts who spoke to the DCNF. “It is possible that inflation returns to 2 percent, but poor fiscal policy can make it much harder and more unlikely,” Jai Kedia, a research fellow in the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, told the DCNF. “There’s an economic theory called the ‘fiscal theory of the price level’ and it suggests that a stable economy requires…

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Investors Say They are Betting Inflation Is Here to Stay

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Investors bet on the U.S. entering an era of sustained high inflation as Treasury yields spike, according to Reuters.

The bond market has seen a surge in interest rates for 10-year Treasury yields, reaching 4.59 percent, the highest point since September 2007 before the country was sent into a recession just months later, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The state of the bond market indicates that investors believe that the age of low inflation and interest rates is over as the country enters a “high-pressure equilibrium,” driving inflation higher than what was previously considered normal, according to Reuters.

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Fed Study: Ending Pandemic Unemployment Aid Connected to ‘Substantial Rise’ in Employment

The Center Square

States that ended pandemic unemployment aid saw “a substantial rise” in employment, according to a recent working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The study, which used data from 46 states and Washington, D.C., found that “in the three months following a state’s [emergency unemployment benefits] termination, employment increased by about 37 people for every 100-person reduction in EUB recipients.”

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