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Connor Hughes and his wife Brieanne both grew up outside Philadelphia. They met working at an ice cream shop in high school and stayed together during college despite going to different schools. Hughes says they’ve both been fortunate enough to find decent-paying jobs, and they’ve been smart with their money, knowing in the back of their minds that they wanted to buy a house one day, with more than $100,000 saved. They’ve even got a baby on the way. There’s just one problem: They’re losing hope of finding anything affordable in south Jersey and ever moving out of their two-bedroom...

Consumer confidence fell in May as Americans became more pessimistic about the labor market, on top of elevated anxiety over inflation. The Conference Board reported Tuesday that its consumer confidence index fell to 102.3 in May from 103.7 in April. It’s the fourth time in five months that overall U.S. consumer confidence has declined.

When candidates run for public office — local, state, or federal — they campaign on some careful blend of their résumés, their personalities, and their political issues. Thus it has always been, and thus it will always be, in a republic. "Vote for me because I have the experience to do it well," or "Vote for me because I'm so much like you, I'll represent your interests," or "Vote for me because we agree on these twenty or thirty specific issues." But there is something going on that we don't usually expect, and while it's been in process for a...

U.S. businesses slightly lowered their inventories in March as spending tightened and consumers prioritized services over goods. Business inventories declined by an adjusted 0.1% in March after being flat in February, data from the U.S. Commerce Department showed Tuesday. February's reading was revised from an initially estimated 0.2% increase. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal expected inventories would be flat. Inventories rose by 0.7% at retailers, were flat at wholesalers and slid 0.8% at manufacturers. On an annual basis, total business inventories were up 6.5%, the data showed. The ratio of inventories to sales, which hints at how many...

Who knew? Progressive economists are now attacking economics. According to Burton Abrams "progressives in the Democrat Party, backed… by left-wing sociologists and political scientists": deny basic economic principles and theory. They deny that incentives matter, that markets work better than government dictates, that scarcity and opportunity costs exist, that the laws of supply and demand are operative, that benefit-cost analyses have merit, and that economic efficiency makes consumers and producers better off. Okay, fine. So how do progressive experience things? They rely heavily on the vaguely defined concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In other words, politics. In another proof...

A government debt default would be catastrophic for the US economy, sparking mass unemployment, payment failures, and interest rates rising "into perpetuity," according to US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. "Since 1789, the United States has paid all of our bills on time, and it should stay that way," Yellen said at a Washington conference on Tuesday, warning of an economic disaster if the US failed to meet its debt obligations. A debt default will likely result in the government failing to make key military and social security payments, she speculated, and would cause mass layoffs of government officials. Households would...

D.R. Horton DHI –0.31% stock was jumping after the home builder reported better-than-expected earnings Thursday. D.R. Horton (ticker: DHI) reported a profit of $2.73 a share in the fiscal second quarter, easily beating analyst forecasts for $1.93, on sales of $7.97 billion, topping estimates for $6.45 billion. “Despite higher mortgage rates and inflationary pressures, demand improved during the quarter due to normal seasonal factors, coupled with our use of incentives and pricing adjustments to adapt to changing market conditions,” Donald R. Horton, chairman of D.R. Horton’s board, said in a press release. “Although higher interest rates and economic uncertainty may...

Finland’s center-right National Coalition Party was on course to take power in a general election Sunday after voter concerns about the economic outlook fed dissatisfaction with Social Democrat incumbent Sanna Marin, a star of the European left. With 99 percent of votes counted, the National Coalition Party (NCP) under the leadership of Petteri Orpo had secured 48 of Finland’s 200 parliamentary seats, pushing Marin’s party into third place with 43. The far-right Finns Party was second with 46 seats. The defeat of Marin would represent the latest blow for the European left with Germany’s Olaf Scholz under pressure at home...

Here comes the panic. Bloomberg just reported that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen – who was singlehandedly responsible for stoking and restarting the bank crisis on Wednesday which until that day was easing back, with her comments that nobody in charge was even talking about a uniform deposit insurance, let alone working on one – will convene the heads of top US financial regulators Friday morning for a previously unscheduled meeting of the Financial Stability Oversight Council. The meeting will be closed to the public, the Treasury Department said in a statement. The Treasury didn’t say what time the meeting would...

Here’s a pop quiz. Some questions are conceptual, others ask about particular facts. The correct answers are supplied at the end. (But don’t cheat by peeking beforehand at the answers!) Good luck!

As credit card debt hit an all-time high — just shy of $1 trillion — in the final three months of 2022, delinquencies among borrowers accelerated. Balances grew $61 billion in the fourth quarter from the previous one to $986 billion, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found. That marked the largest quarterly increase and the highest total since the series began in 1999. At the same time, the rate at which credit card holders missed payments and became more than 90 days behind was higher than before the pandemic, especially among younger borrowers, a potentially worrying sign when...

It is gratifying to see a few other commentators starting to notice the dramatic contrasts between New York and Florida in government spending and policy outcomes. Here at Manhattan Contrarian, I first covered the subject in December 2020, with a post titled “Contrast Between New York And Florida.” I followed that up with reviews of the respective state budgets in April 2021 (“State Budget Time In New York And Florida”). And now others are weighing in. The Wall Street Journal had a lead editorial on the subject on February 9, with the headline “New York vs. Florida, By the Numbers.”...

The engine of the U.S. economy—consumer spending—is starting to sputter. Retail purchases have fallen in three of the past four months. Spending on services, including rent, haircuts and the bulk of bills, was flat in December, after adjusting for inflation, the worst monthly reading in nearly a year. Sales of existing homes in the U.S. fell last year to their lowest level since 2014 as mortgage rates rose. The auto industry posted its worst sales year in more than a decade.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's finances are becoming increasingly precarious, Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki warned on Monday, just as markets test whether the central bank can keep interest rates ultra-low, allowing the government to service its debt. The government has been helped by near-zero bond yields, but bond investors have recently sought to break the Bank of Japan's (BOJ) 0.5% cap on the 10-year bond yield, as inflation runs at 41-year highs, double the central bank's 2% target. "Japan's public finances have increased in severity to an unprecedented degree as we have compiled supplementary budgets to respond to the coronavirus and...

The past year has been a rough one for the wild hot takes of The New York Times’s phony economics savant Paul Krugman. His ridiculous record on the state of the economy under President Joe Biden makes it hard to see how he still takes himself seriously. Krugman used 2022 to praise the inflation and labor-shortage-rattled economy as “amazing,” double down on his imaginary “Biden Boom” and convince the masses that skyrocketing inflation was a transitory phenomenon. Despite admitting in July that he was “wrong” on the inflation crisis, Krugman continued to spew his flapdoodle with hubris and impunity on...

… Pot farms across the state are shutting down as wholesale cannabis prices have crashed by as much as 95% since California voters legalized weed in 2016, according to SFGATE interviews with over a dozen California cannabis farmers, who could get as much as $2,000 for a pound of pot in 2016. Today, they’re lucky to get $400 — and some pot is selling for as little as $100 a pound. Economists have been predicting that legalization would cause a drop in wholesale pot prices since states first began discussing the pot reform. But cannabis farmers say that California’s government...

The late, great Julian Simon spent decades battling intellectually against biologists and zoologists who were convinced that human population growth, if governments did not hold it in check with draconian measures, would spell doom for multitudes of humans.

Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust Inc. has been facing withdrawal requests exceeding its quarterly limit, a major test for the one of the private equity firm’s most ambitious efforts to reach individual investors. The news, in a letter Thursday, sent Blackstone stock falling as much as 10%, the biggest drop since March. “Our business is built on performance, not fund flows, and performance is rock solid,” a Blackstone spokesperson said, adding that BREIT’s concentration in rental housing and logistics in the Sun Belt leaves it well positioned going forward. This year, the fund has piled into more than $20 billion...

The District is still stuck in a pandemic funk. Most days, the city, especially the core downtown blocks around the White House, looks more like a ghost town than a vibrant capital city. Before the coronavirus shutdown, visitors to Washington were often in awe of how many cranes punctuated the skyline. Now, it’s hard to find a building without a “for rent” sign. Coffee shops and restaurants are serving limited hours, if they’re open at all. Hopes were high for a revival this fall. Schools reopened. Covid cases were way down. Businesses were calling their employees back. But the city...