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In a surprising move, the Federal Reserve is hinting at multiple rate cuts in 2024, sparking questions about the stability of the financial system. This decision has historical echoes, as every major rate cut since the 1970s has been followed by a substantial 30% drawdown in the S&P 500. For the first time in recent history, Chair Powell’s alignment with market expectations signals a potential departure from the usual cautious stance. The market has responded positively, with the S&P 500 on track for its 9th green day out of the last 10, reflecting investor confidence in the Federal Reserve’s promises.

*The US economy is lurching toward a recession, according to Jeff Gundlach. *The DoubleLine Capital chief pointed to a "de-inverted" bond-yield curve and the rising unemployment rate as signs of a looming slump. *Layoffs are coming," he warned. The US economy is clearly headed toward a recession, veteran bond investor Jeff Gundlach has warned. The DoubleLine Capital CEO said Wednesday that the yield curve – a bond-market gauge that measures the gap between 2-year and 10-year Treasury yields – is signaling that a downturn is coming. "The shape of the yield curve is extremely unstable at this time," Gundlach told...

igher car prices and rising interest rates are hindering car owners’ ability to afford their vehicle payments, as 6.1% of subprime auto borrowers are at least 60 days past due on their loans, the highest percentage in data dating back to 1994, according to Bloomberg, which cited Fitch Ratings.

Ford Motor recently announced it is slashing prices on its F-150 Lightning, an electric vehicle the company rolled out in 2021. The Lightning now carries a suggested retail price of $49,995, about $10,000 lower than its previous recommended price tag ($59,974), a reduction the company says is possible because of lower “battery raw material costs and continued work on scaling production and cost.” It’s certainly possible that reduced overhead from battery minerals and production costs played a role in Ford’s decision to trim its price tag by nearly 20 percent, but that may be only half the story. Several reports...

Bidenomics, aka the Federal government takeover of the US economy with Soviet-style economic central planning, is highly dependent on loose Federal Reserve monetary policy (Janet Yellen and Powell’s wild overreaction to the massively inappropriate Covid shutdowns), So, how is Bidenomics working out? On the bank lending front, commercial and industrial (C&I) lending growth is crashing along with bank credit growth YoY. The US Treasury 10Y-2Y yield curve remains deeply inverted at -91.031 basis points and M2 Money growth has crashed. The 30 year mortgage rate is hovering around 7.27%. And WTI Crude oil futures are up 1% this morning. The...

Ford Motor said Thursday pushed back production targets for its electric vehicles, citing slower-than-expected adoption. Ford now expects to be building EVs at a rate of 600,000 per year sometime during 2024, a delay from earlier estimates that it would reach that level by the end of 2023. The automaker had previously targeted a rate of more than 2 million per year by the end of 2026, but now says it doesn't know when it'll achieve that volume. "The transition to EVs is happening, it just may take a little longer," CFO John Lawler said following the automaker's second-quarter earnings...

Goldman Sachs reported significantly lower profit for the second quarter, hurt by write-downs in its consumer and asset-management businesses. The bank on Wednesday said quarterly profit was $1.22 billion, down 58% from a year ago. That amounted to $3.08 per share, which missed the $3.16 per share expected by analysts polled by FactSet. Revenue was $10.9 billion, down 8% from a year ago. That still beat the $10.61 billion expected by analysts. Goldman is the only one among its big-bank peers to miss per-share earnings expectations. And while Citigroup and Morgan Stanley also reported profit declines, Goldman’s was the biggest....

Biden’s massive spending spree (aka, Build Back Better) has a new name: Build Back Bankrupt! According to Epiq, Commercial Chapter 11 Filings Increased 68 Percent in the First Half of 2023. NEW YORK – July 03, 2023 — The 2,973 total commercial Chapter 11 bankruptcies filed during the first six months of 2023 represented a 68 percent increase over the 1,766 filed during the same period in 2022, according to data provided by Epiq Bankruptcy, the leading provider of U.S. bankruptcy filing data. Individual Chapter 13 filings increased by 23 percent during the same period. Overall commercial filings registered 12,107...

On Thursday’s broadcast of “CNN This Morning,” Biden 2024 Campaign Co-Chair Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) responded to President Joe Biden’s poor economic poll numbers by stating that the numbers are bad because “people really got in a pretty sour mood during that pandemic,” people will see the impact of President Joe Biden’s economic policies, and “We have not spent enough time accentuating the positives that exist today.”

Our long slide toward economic oblivion continues, and survey after survey has shown that most Americans are deeply unsatisfied with the current state of the U.S. economy. Inflation is out of control, most Americans are getting poorer due to the rapidly rising cost of living, the housing bubble has started to burst, and the commercial real estate market is a giant mess. But employment is supposed to be our bright spot. The Biden administration continues to tell us that the unemployment rate is less than 4 percent and that there are lot of jobs available for those that want them....

I was hoping that the week of July 4th would start off with fireworks, but we got bad news about the economy. US factory activity contracted for an eighth month in June, slipping to the weakest level in more than three years as production, employment and input prices retreated. The Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing gauge fell to 46, the weakest since May 2020, from 46.9 a month earlier, according to data released Monday. The current stretch of readings below 50, which indicates shrinking activity, is the longest since 2008-2009. The decline in the ISM production gauge, which also stands...

I wonder if Biden’s proposed railroad from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean will generate massive industrial production growth? Is this more Bidenomics?? Industrial production unexpectedly dips in May. It peaked eight months ago. On a year-over-year basis, May’s Industrial Production declined to a lame 0.23%. As The Fed hikes rates and slows M2 Money growth. Today the Fed released its Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization report for May 2023. Industrial production edged down 0.2 percent in May following two consecutive months of increases. The Bloomberg Econoday consensus was a small increase. In May, the index for manufacturing ticked up...

Well, Biden and McCarthy have agreed in principle to a budget revision, raise the debt ceiling and avoid a US debt default. The Uniparty strikes again! No restraint of reckless Federal spending t speak of . The big donor class wins and middle class Americans lose. Mike Shedlock (aka, Mish) makes a good point: the US is already in recession if we look at GDI (gross domestic income) rather than GDP (gross domestic product). The US has already declined two consecutive quarters in terms of negative GDI growth. Mish’s chart: The Uniparty heads.

The CEO of New York City grocery store chain Gristedes is sounding the alarm over all the "dumb things" the government is doing as inflation persists. When FOX Business host Maria Bartiromo asked John Catsimatidis when Americans will see a break at the supermarket he said: "When the food executives feel confident that Washington is not doing dumb things." "When they feel that their earnings… are going to survive," he continued. His comments came on the heels of inflation jumping 0.4% in April as prices remain stubbornly high. The Labor Department said Wednesday that the consumer price index, a broad...

The largest financial institutions deemed systemically important are expanding even more during the 2023 banking crisis, leading to greater systemic risks, according to economists who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation. These developments and future ones will cause more consolidation in the sector. “Increasing the concentration in the banking industry simply increases the systemic risk,” E.J. Antoni, research fellow for Regional Economics at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis, told the DCNF. “There were already concerns about concentrations of deposits in the banking industry, both because a few firms already held such a large portion of the deposits...

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday enacted a quarter percentage point interest rate increase, expressing caution about the recent banking crisis and indicating that hikes are nearing an end. Along with its ninth hike since March 2022, the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee noted that future increases are not assured and will depend largely on incoming data. “The Committee will closely monitor incoming information and assess the implications for monetary policy,” the FOMC’s post-meeting statement said. “The Committee anticipates that some additional policy firming may be appropriate in order to attain a stance of monetary policy that is sufficiently restrictive to...

Wall Street ended Friday -- the final day of the month and the quarter -- on another down note, with the main stock indexes posting their third straight quarterly loss for the first time since the Great Recession. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 500 points for a loss of 1.7 percent on the day, marking a decline of 8.8 percent for the month of September, 6.6 percent for the quarter, and 21 percent since the start of the year. The market's dismal recent performance follows historically high inflation, rapidly rising interest rates, and fears that the economy could soon...

The Biden Economy — .. falling apart, everything, everywhere all at once. NYSE halted trading of Charles Schwab, whose shares fell by more than 20%, and even a few Etsy sellers have been impacted by the fallout of Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) collapse. Schwab’s fall was the firm’s “most ever on an intraday-basis,” ... Signature Bank, “a key financial institution for the cryptocurrency industry,” according to the New York Post, was shut down on Sunday over “similar systemic risk” to SVB. SVB and Signature are the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history, respectively, with combined assets in excess...

Under this new digital currency, any transfer of funds to family, friends, charities, or clients would be able to be tracked by the nation's central bank that issued this virtual money. Big Brother will be in your wallet every hour or every day. You will not be able to buy a stick of gum without a Federal Reserve computer knowing where, when, and to whom you just put down a buck. We should be rightfully concerned about inflation, energy independence, aggressor nations armed with nuclear weapons, and woke public policies that denigrate the very foundation of this great country. But...

My former boss and mentor Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, used to quip that "liberals love jobs, but they hate employers." Based on his budget proposal released earlier this week, you would have to say that Biden flat-out loathes employers. Never before in American history has a president released a budget/tax plan that wallops American businesses with a bigger tax bill than this. The budget Biden proposes contains roughly $4 trillion in higher taxes over the next decade. He keeps saying that he just wants millionaires and billionaires to "pay their fair share," but this plan isn’t so...