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Elizabeth Trovall - Aug 10, 2023
The July Consumer Price Index out Thursday shows inflation ticking up — almost wholly due to shelter inflation. But how the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the price people pay for housing includes some lagging data. So, while shelter inflation is still at 7.7% year-on-year, economists are incorporating new, more timely data into their forecasts that shows a cooling of housing prices.
The thing about the rental data the government uses to calculate the Consumer Price Index is that, as San Francisco Federal Reserve economist John Mondragon told us, “It can be really sticky. If you’re renting an apartment, you signed, say, typically a one year lease, your rent is going to be fixed for that year.”
So if you’ve been in your apartment for ten years, your rent could be much lower than a new renter’s. Which is why Mondragon also likes to look at other data to see , “People who are moving today, what are they paying?”
Zillow is one place to look for asking rents, said Kitty Richards with the Groundwork Collaborative.
“Housing costs inflation has actually been cooling since last summer, and is already down to pre-pandemic levels,” Richards said.
During the pandemic, lagging shelter inflation data failed to capture the sudden increase in rents, said Harvard University lecturer Judd Cramer.
“So what people are hoping is that now the pattern sort of reverses itself. Shelter inflation works itself back down to 2%, 3%, even 0%,” Cramer said.
Cramer said the BLS is looking at experimental measures to help track real-time rent inflation data.
Problems with affordable housing aren’t going away, said economist Robert Dietz with the National Association of Home Builders.
“We’ve got the tightest housing market for more than 40 years,” Dietz said.
The more policymakers can increase the supply of houses, he said, the more the price of housing will cool.
Elizabeth Trovall reported this story from Houston.
Same here. An experienced manager best to navigate difficult waters. I tried using a 10-20 year Treasury ETF as a small hedging tool against sharp equity sell offs. The idea wasn’t to make any money, but to smooth out the ride. I still like the concept, but found the volatility too much for me to handle. Made a few pennies over a week and got out.Don’t think it is all or nothing approach. We use active managed bond funds to help us on the duration aspect of bonds.
At times like this, the young people say:Income investing is a myth that has been promoted for years. In many cases, the writer wants to sell you something. Income investing as someone's main/first criterion has no legs in reality because TR=total return (performance) is the ultimate indicator. TR includes everything and all distributions are part of it. Risk-adjusted performance is the first thing you look for, after that, you can look for high distributions.
I have been discussing HIGH INCOME since 2010.
First came ATT,VZ,IBM as a must vs SPY,QQQ. A simple chart can prove how pathetic ATT,VZ,IBM were since 2010.
Then came MLP which lost more than half.
Then came fixed income CEFs where they made a total of 6-7% in the last 5 years while SPY made over 70%.
Lastly, I'm not against high distributions, I'm against using it as someone's main criterion.
Same here. They do banking basics very well and efficiently. They're not out to beat quarterly numbers and 'analyst estimates' or start making tons of money for themselves. I've been a member of my CU since 1995 and for the most part I remain very happy with them.My preference is to use a local institution for checking and direct deposit.
I'm a member of a locally-based credit union with many nearby branches.
If any issues arise, I can readily speak to someone in person.
Over the years, I've found that CUs generally offer better terms for loans, credit cards,
and checking/savings accounts than many brick-and-mortar banks.
Their customer service is also superior to big banks in my experience.
My credit union provided a Medallion signature guarantee when I transferred
a Roth IRA from one institution to another.
Note: I also have an Ally online savings account.
Moody’s [downgraded] the credit ratings of 10 banks and put others under review, or giving their ratings a negative outlook. Credit ratings are very important for banks, which fund themselves partly with deposits, but also by selling bonds.
But the ratings moves are a reminder that many of the core issues revealed by the crisis this year—such as the risks posed by higher interest rates—are only beginning to be addressed. And one risk that investors can’t afford to ignore is that longer-term interest rates could keep pushing higher, even as the Federal Reserve looks to be pausing its rate hikes.
However, Moody’s also wrote that it saw some key issues unaddressed by the Fed’s thousand-plus-page proposal.
Moody’s analysts acknowledged in their Monday report that the Fed’s tougher capital requirements for banks with over $100 billion in assets should be positive for their credit risk, [but also said] that interest-rate risk is “significantly more complicated” than that. For example, there is the diminished value of loans like fixed-rate mortgages—a huge problem for First Republic, for one. In its analysis, Moody’s applied a 15% haircut to the value of banks’ outstanding residential mortgages.
The bond market’s focus on worst-case scenarios may explain the gap between the performance of many lenders’ debts versus their shares. In theory, higher capital requirements coming for many banks ought to provide more comfort for bondholders, who focus more on existential risk, than shareholders, who should be worried about the drag on banks’ returns on equity from higher equity levels.
But this security cushion isn’t what markets appear to be reflecting. Across regional banks with A ratings, though their bonds have rallied in recent weeks, investors are still demanding a lot more return to own them than they were prior to SVB’s collapse. The gap between those banks’ senior bond yields versus Treasurys was still about 50% wider than on March 8 as of Monday.
It is a relief that banks have found a number of ways to stabilize their earnings and rebuild some capital, but bond market jitters show there is still a lot more work to be done.
Given that huge rise in global prices, how could prices in the United States not have gone up a lot? Indeed, there have been big food price rises around the world, for example, in Europe:
So food inflation is mainly a global story. But what caused that global food spike? It seems to have been a perfect storm of adverse events (including actual storms).
Now, the prices U.S. consumers pay for food haven’t closely tracked the global price index, and in general have gone up by less. But that’s not surprising, because the indexes are measuring somewhat different things. The World Bank is estimating the prices of raw foodstuffs, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics is measuring the prices of purchased foods
The bottom line is that even though many people would like someone to blame for high grocery prices, it’s really hard to find domestic villains. Despite what the American right claims, Joe Biden didn’t do this. Despite what some on the left would like to believe, neither, at least for the most part, did greedy corporations.
Sometimes, as the bumper stickers don’t quite say, stuff just happens.
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