HEAVY SUPPLY REMAINS AN ISSUE FOR US TREASURIES
The US Treasury is selling $108 billion of 3-year, 10-year and 30-year bonds on Monday and Tuesday, along with $213 billion of shorter-term bills. This year’s Treasury sales are poised to surpass the record set in 2020. Source: Lisa Abramowitz, WSJ
Over the last 30 years, the purchasing power of the US consumer dollar has been cut in half due to inflation
At the same time, the S&P 500 has gained 764% (>7% per year) after adjusting for inflation. Source: Charlie Bilello
Nice one by Lyn Alden -> Since the start of 2020, the United States has taken on $10.7 trillion in new public debt (i.e. accumulated deficits)
That's about $80k per household in four years. Have households received that much in deficit spending? Some did, but likely very few of them... Source: Lyn Alden
U.S. ECONOMIC DATA THIS WEEK:
*CPI INFLATION (TUES.) *PPI INFLATION, FED POLICY DECISION (WED.) *RETAIL SALES, JOBLESS CLAIMS (THURS.) *NY FED MANUFACTURING INDEX, INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION, SERVICES PMI & MANUFACTURING PMI (FRI.) Source: www.investing.com
Losses at the Fed have now passed $125 billion
Source: Win Smart, CFA
The ADP jobs report shows that the US labor market is cooling
U.S. firms scaled back hiring in November. Adding only 103k private payrolls compared 130k expected, according to ADP. Job cuts were seen in manufacturing, construction, and leisure/hospitality sectors. ADP’s report is based on payroll data covering +25 million US private-sector employees. Source: Genevieve Roch-Decter, CFA, Bloomberg
Here's one illustration of the US commercial real estate market meltdown: values of commercial real estate continues to get destroyed in Chicago...
A 155k SF office building in Chicago just sold for $17 million, or $109 per SF The seller took a huge 61% loss, paying $44 million for the building in 2017 Here's a worrying snippet from Crain's: "Thanks to remote work and higher interest rates, real estate investors can buy downtown office buildings on the cheap these days. Add a motivated seller trying to unload all of its office stock and the discount gets even steeper. Many office properties in the heart of the [Chicago] are now worth less than the mortgages tied to them, fueling a historic wave of distress." It will be interesting to see how bad the US commercial real estate meltdown gets (particularly in office) but it's certainly a story to keep an eye on in 2024 as big opportunities emerge". Source: TripleNetInvest
The US job market is starting to crater...
With consensus expecting only a modest drop from the reported September 9.553 million job openings, what the BLS reported moments ago instead was a stunning collapse of 617K job openings to just 8.733 million, the lowest since March 2021. This was a 6-sigma miss to the consensus estimate of 9.3 million... Source: www.zerohedge.com, Bloomberg
