New Home Sales Up (but beware double digit monthly gains)
Commerce Department reported that April new-home sales jumped an unexpected 16.2% — the biggest monthly gain in 14 years. The year...
WSJ: Overstated Job Market Strength?
We have long stated that the official BLS data was a rather artificially optimistic assessment of the actual employment picture. Our...
OER / CPI and New York Rentals
Can CPI go lower, regardless of what inflation actually does? Yes, according to Barclay’s Capital Research (whic we cited earlier)....
OER, CPI and the Fed: A Strange Love Story
What do apartment rents in NYC have to do with Federal Reserve policy, interest rates, and rising bond yields? According to a recent...
The Value of the Dollar
This week’s Up and Down Wall Street looks at a recent analysis out of QB Partners. They are a hedge fund run by Lee Quaintance and...
Housing is Falling Much Faster than Reported
Real Estate Consultant John Burns has looked at the housing data and reached a rather interesting conclusion: "The housing market...
Inflation Errors (Part II)
Yesterday, we looked at a way to measure actual Inflation: Comparing the "spread" between the Headline CPI data, and that of...
Want to Measure Actual Inflation? See the Core/Headline CPI Spread
As we have previously discussed, inflation remains contained to the rest of the world ex-USA. Globalization be damned, there may be rapid...
CPI & Retail Sales
The rollicking response to Friday’s PPI data makes today’s Consumer Price Index especially significant. Last week, we learned...
Commerce Retail Sales Data: Beware Gas Inflation
Yesterday, we looked at the abysmal Same Store Sales data (Retail Sales = Hard Landing ?) Today, we will get the Commerce...