Consumer Economy
- Industrial Production (INDPRO) 103.0 +0.21 (+0.20% m/m)
- Housing Starts (HOUST) 1.24M -176k (-12.44% m/m)
- Pending Home Sales 71,200 -1,300 (-1.8% m/m)
Industrial Production (an index) continued rising this month. It has been rising slowly, but is not recessionary.
Housing Starts (units): expected +1.35M, actual +1.24M. Moving slowly lower.
Here are housing starts vs housing starts (adjusted for US population). For some mysterious reason, housing starts adjusted for population have peaked at progressively lower levels over the past (maybe) 40 years.
Central Banksters are baffled as to why.
Pending home sales fell to the lowest level in 8 months. Not BOOMING. It has been bouncing sideways near the lows for the past 3 years, give or take. FRED doesn’t have this one – it came from NAR via mortgagenewsdaily.com. Now just think if I divided this by the US POP…catastrophe.
https://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/data/pending-home-sales
Credit & Rates
- Total Bank Credit (TOTBKCR) 19.80T +9.3B (+0.05% w/w)
- Fed Balance Sheet (WALCL) 6.75T -14.3B (-0.21% w/w)
- US 30 Year Mortgage Rate (MORTGAGE30US) 6.65% -2 bp
- 3-Month Treasury (DGS3MO) 3.81% -5 bp
- 1-Year Treasury (DGS1) 4.02% +4 bp
- 10-Year Treasury (DGS10) 4.74% +6 bp
- 20+ Treasury ETF (TLT.N) +0.01% w/w
- US Confidence (AAA10Y) 1.19% -5 bp
Bankster credit growth this week was way too small – just 9.3B, and it needs to be 20B+. And, the Fed reverse-printed 14 BILLION! I’m especially concerned about the drop in bankster credit growth. It could be the AI Credit bubble starting to pop, with credit showing an average of 7.3 billion over the past 4 weeks [-25B +29B +16B +9B]. Things are trending in the wrong way, going into Evil September.
Rates moved out of the middle part of the curve and into the short end of the curve. The biggest winner was the 1-month [-9 bp], while the biggest loser was the 5-year [+7 bp].
The 20+ year ETF was almost unchanged, rising 0.01 [+0.01%] after hitting a new 20-year low on Tuesday [of 81.17]. TLT remains in a downtrend, but the “high wave” candle seemed perhaps a little bullish to me. A big dip was (halfway) bought.
Of course, much of the fuss about TLT [a big rally on Wed, followed by a decline Thursday/Friday] was driven by Treasury buyback news.
There was a pretty large decline in confidence this week; AAA10Y fell by 5 basis points, and it happened
by cmartenson 
