Free Republic

Troubles of Brookfield DTLA show how some office-sector bets are starting to unravel ... A major Los Angeles office owner operated by Brookfield Asset Management is struggling to make mortgage payments as vacancies and rising interest rates disrupt the city’s commercial real-estate market. The company, known as Brookfield DTLA Fund Office Trust Investor Inc., owns six Los Angeles office buildings and a retail center. Five of the office buildings face the risk of foreclosure, according to its public filings, and at least two of its mortgages are in default. The company on April 21 filed to delist from the New...

The Congressional Budget Office on Monday revealed that the cost of payments on the federal debt soared 41 percent in the first six months of the fiscal year thanks to higher interest rates — driving the deficit up to $1.1 trillion over the period. Top Financial Stories Argentina Shouldn’t Expect a ‘Dead Cow’ Bounce Marcos Falcone NRPLUS Garett Jones Rethinks Immigration Policy Dominic Pino NRPLUS Lessons from Nigel Lawson Andrew Stuttaford NRPLUS Under President Biden, massive spending has fueled not only high deficits but also inflation. The Federal Reserve Board has pursued an aggressive rate-increasing campaign to try and tame...

Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Loretta Mester said on Tuesday that the U.S. central bank likely has more interest rate rises ahead amid signs the recent banking sector troubles have been contained. To keep inflation on a sustained downward path to 2% and keep inflation expectations anchored, Mester said she sees monetary policy moving “somewhat further into restrictive territory this year, with the fed funds rate moving above 5% and the real fed funds rate staying in positive territory for some time.” “Precisely how much higher the federal funds rate will need to go from here and for how...

The Federal Reserve Chairman’s testimony to Congress next week is likely to be very succinct and can be summed up neatly as ” the risks of doing too little are far greater than the risks of doing too much,” economists said Friday. “The Fed is getting a little more hawkish than we pictured them at the end of last year,” said Michael Gregory, deputy chief economist at BMO Capital Markets. Powell will testify on Tuesday to the Senate Banking Committee and on Wednesday to the House Financial Services panel. Both hearings are set to begin at 10 a.m. Eastern. Recent...

Rapidly rising food, housing, medical, and tuition prices are squeezing Americans, and many do not understand the real cause of their falling living standards...That confusion opens the door for opportunistic politicians who promise supposed freebies to ease the pain of inflation. Many, unfortunately, succumb to this siren’s call.Perverse as it is, the policies offered to people suffering from inflation create even more inflation. In other words, inflation has a way of perpetuating itself, much like a heroin addiction.We are already seeing cockamamie schemes in the US, like “inflation relief checks,” which attempt to solve the problems of inflation by creating...

BREAKING: A record 36% of U.S. adults now have more credit card debt than savings. This is up from 27% in 2022 and 21% in 2021. Credit card debt jumped $130 billion in 2022, the biggest increase in history, to $986 billion. We are "fighting" inflation with credit card debt. Credit card debt is up 15% over the last YEAR and 7% over the last QUARTER. "High rates and inflation" are to blame, according to the New York Fed. Worst part? Rates are still rising and inflation just increased for the first time since October 2022. How can this end...

A bond-market gauge of impending U.S. recessions fell just shy of reaching its most negative reading since October 1981, when interest rates were 19% under Paul Volcker’s Federal Reserve. That gauge, which measures the spread between 2- TMUBMUSD02Y, 4.492% and 10-year Treasury yields TMUBMUSD10Y, 3.662%, finished the New York session on Thursday at minus 82.5 basis points. In other words, the 10-year yield was trading 82.5 basis points below the 2-year yield. Over much of the day, the spread appeared to be on track to surpass its Dec. 7 low of minus 84.9 basis points and seemed headed for the...

About 270,000 homebuyers who bought during the red-hot housing market this year already owe more than their house is worth... Among the 450,000 underwater borrowers in the third quarter, nearly 60% had mortgages originated in the first nine months of 2022... That's about 1 in 12 homes purchased in 2022 with a mortgage, or 8%. Nearly 40% of homes bought this year have less than 10% of equity left to tap. The figures reflect yet another fallout from rapidly rising mortgage rates this year, which have put pressure on housing values as home price growth cools at a record pace...

The next Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in on Wednesday, November 2nd. Let’s see what The Fed does with its BIG GREEN BAG … OF MONEY. As I set here on Sunday morning waiting to see how the Cleveland Browns will lose to cross-state rival Cincinnati Bengals, I see that both the US Treasury 10yr-2yr and 10yr-3mo yield curves are inverted (below zero). Core inflation (CPI less food and energy) YoY (blue line) was only 1.3% in February 2021 shortly after Biden was sworn-in as President and is now 6.6% in September 2022. That is over a 400%...

After it joined the World Trade Organization in 2000 and anchored the Chinese yuan (a.k.a. renminbi) to the U.S. dollar, China linked its economy to the United States. Enforcing a fixed exchange rate regime with strict capital controls, China benefited from large inflows and relatively low-interest rates due largely to the low-interest rate environment in the United States. What happens to the Chinese economy when interest rates increase in the United States?Sovereign currency policy faces the intractable dilemma of what economists call the “impossible trinity.” Countries can have a fixed exchange rate, free capital flow, or sovereign monetary policy but...

Treasury Bond yields have broken a downtrend stretching back to the 1980s.The Fed told us it would be a bad year for Treasury bonds when it announced earlier this year it would reduce the number of bonds held on its balance sheet to help curb inflation. Nevertheless, their poor performance has been jaw-dropping. The 20-year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) is down 34% from its peak in December, and 2-year Treasury bond yields (yields move inverse to bond prices) have spiked from below 0.80% to 4.3% this year alone. Bonds' rapid decline has caused steep losses for investors who built...

Powell made his comments at a news conference following the Fed’s decision to raise its benchmark interest rate by 75 basis points in its ongoing quest to tame inflation — the third straight time rates have been hiked by that amount. His comments also came on the heels of the National Association of Realtors’ latest home sales report, released on Wednesday. That report found that existing-home sales experienced a slight dip in August 2022 — the seventh straight month of declines. Year-over-year sales fell in all four major U.S. regions. Despite slower sales, housing prices have continued to zoom higher...

Investors are running scared. Chalk it up to the August CPI reading, which prompted a brutal sell-off on Wall Street last Tuesday. Stocks suffered their largest one-day drop in more than two years. Why? The market took a “glass half empty” view of positive news: The headline inflation rate decreased from 8.5% in July to 8.3% in August. As you can see, inflation has continued to trend downward since peaking in June:Click to enlarge Readers, this is good news. And it’s part of why our inflation nightmare could end within six months. Let me explain… The CPI core rate is...

Argentina’s central bank raised its benchmark interest rate Thursday in a bid to prop up its currency and curb inflation nearing 100%. The central bank boosted its benchmark Leliq rate by 5.5 percentage points to 75%, according to an emailed statement. The move comes a day after data showed consumer prices jumped nearly 79% a year in August, the fastest pace in 30 years. It was the bank’s ninth rate hike this year. The bank’s board of directors also added in the statement that it intends to reduce the level of short-term debt held by the central bank next year,...

Mortgage rates when President Joe Biden took office? 2.65 percent. Today? 6.28 percent.On Tuesday, Biden held a weird celebration of his “Inflation Reduction Act” on the lawn of the White House. Why was it weird? Because at the very same time as Democrats were applauding themselves, the U.S. Labor Department was releasing figures that showed an “unexpected” rise in inflation, with the cost of rent, food, and other basic necessities continuing to skyrocket.Now we learn that mortgage rates have climbed above six percent for the first time since 2008. Wonder what kind of party Biden has planned for this milestone?30-Year...

ock futures dropped on Tuesday morning after an August inflation report came in hotter than expected. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures sank 406 points, or about 1.3%. S&P 500 futures fell 1.7% and Nasdaq 100 futures slid 2.3%. The August consumer price index report showed a higher-than-expected reading for inflation. Headline inflation rose 0.1% month over month, even with falling gas prices. Core inflation rose 0.6% month over month. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting a decline of 0.1% for overall inflation, with a rise of 0.3% for core inflation.

One of the most senior economists in the United States says that the world's largest economy is still in the grip of an inflation crisis that will likely persist for the forseeable future. Loretta Mester is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, which means she is currently one of the 12 people who determine the official interest rate in America. In an exclusive interview with the ABC, Ms Mester had a warning for Americans struggling under the pressure of steep price rises. "I don't have enough evidence now to even conclude that inflation has peaked in the...

The Fed is raising interest rates aggressively in an attempt to tame raging inflation. But according to legendary investor Rick Rule — former president and CEO of investment fund Sprott U.S. Holdings — things may not go as planned for America’s central bank. “I think they’ll chicken out,” he told Stansberry Research earlier this month. “If we had a period of real interest rates it would certainly cure inflation, but it wouldn't cure inflation until it did amazing damage to various balance sheets.” This isn't the first time Rule has voiced concern about the economy’s ability to handle substantially higher...

"I would say if you’re a home buyer, you need a bit of a reset," Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said yesterday.U.S. mortgage rates surged the most in more than 36 years this week, data from Freddie Mac indicated Thursday, as house buying costs continue to track the Federal Reserve's interest rate path amid the ongoing surge in domestic inflation. Freddie Mac, the biggest individual mortgage loan buyer in the country, said 30-year fixed mortgage rates surged to 5.78%, a half-point increase from last week and the biggest increase since 1987. The headline rate, Freddie Mac said, is the highest since...

The Fed has barely started raising interest rates but the air is already seeping out of the housing bubble.New single-family home sales plunged by 16.6% from March and were down 26.9% year on year. New home sales dropped to the lowest level since the lockdown in April 2020.New home sales are often viewed as a leading indicator of the state of the overall housing market.The unsold inventory of new homes spiked by 34,000, a historic month-to-month leap. There were 440,000 unsold new homes (seasonally adjusted), the highest level since May 2008 in the midst of the housing bust. Both, the...