The Census Bureau just published its monthly look at homebuilding activity, and it wasn’t pretty: builders started building at just about a 900,000-unit annual pace last month, way short of the 1+ million-unit pace analysts were expecting.
Oil prices were falling on Friday (March 13), and they’re falling again Monday morning. After staging something of a rally, barrels of the black stuff are once again having a hard time finding bottom. US benchmark West Texas Intermediate is setting new six-year-lows. Not much has changed over the weekend: there’s still a looming US oil glut despite a slowdown in drilling activity. But the market knows best.
The European Central Bank would like a moment of your time, if you can tear your eyes away from the recurring carnage in oil markets. The ECB finally got started with its sovereign bond-buying program aimed at bringing the economy back from the brink. As a result, the euro is falling against the US dollar, to levels not seen in some time—enough to get folks chatting about parity between the two (especially vacationers and fashion enthusiasts).
Just when it looked like oil was staging a comeback from its lowest levels this decade, everyone remembered how much of it is still getting pumped out of the ground. And now prices—especially for U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate—are tumbling once again. It’s almost like US commercial crude stocks are the new rig count.
You no longer need to stand in line to use Robinhood, the millennials-focused commission-free stock-trading app.
Remember last year, when coffee prices were spiking and everyone from Dunkin Donuts to Starbucks was raising their prices? Well, coffee prices are moving in the other direction now.
SoulCycle, the spin class that doubles as a lifestyle, might be going public, per Reuters.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics just unleashed its latest look at turnover in the job market, and the rate of workers putting in notice ticked back up after falling briefly a few months earlier. If the rate continues to move higher in the months ahead, it will reach a post-crisis high.
Encouraging news from one of Europe’s hardest-hit economies: after 24 quarters of declines, Spanish housing prices have now registered three straight quarters of year-over-year gains. Spain hasn’t been on a streak like this since late 2007-early 2008.
The waves of grain rippling across America’s heartland lost a little luster this week. Investors are thinking that global production will be a bit higher in the near future per Agrimoney, based on estimates coming out of Russia and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (Prices were also hurt by concern that some end users may back away from US wheat contaminated with an unpleasantly named infection known as vomitoxin, which can infect wheat grown in wet conditions.). Further, the same strong dollar that’s holding back other US exports is prices for wheat. The US is one of the world’s top exporters of the grain.
The US created 295,000 jobs last month.
It’s that time of the month again, when all economically focused eyes turn to the US jobs report.
The US Federal Reserve issued its latest round of results measuring the strength of the country’s largest banks and it looks pretty good: All 31 institutions the Fed tested passed this go-around, meaning after running through a host of Armageddon-like scenarios, the Fed determined the banks would have enough of a capital cushion to stay afloat.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its fourth-quarter figures for productivity—economic output divided by hours worked—indicating Americans weren’t as productive as they looked at first blush. In fact, the numbers were a letdown versus the initial estimates for the entire second half of 2014.
Before the oil bust begins to more broadly take its economic toll on the good people of North Dakota, they have one more chance to thump their chests in pride. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual look at state employment figures, and North Dakota was again the nation’s envy in 2014, a year that saw unemployment rates fall across the board.
Statistics Canada just released figures on the country’s gross domestic product, and it’s mostly good news. The past few quarters got revised higher, and fourth-quarter growth was better than expected.
The fall in oil prices has been good for Americans’ wallets—and they’re socking a lot of it away.
Apple sold $1.35 billion of Swiss franc-denominated debt this month, including a 10-year note paying 0.375% interest and a 15-year bond with a 0.75% coupon. That’s a lot of money from a relatively small debt market for a company that has a huge cash hoard and is coming off a bunch of other big debt sales.
Germany and Greece are getting along better, which has done wonders for Greek stocks. But plenty of other chart-worthy stuff happened this week.
The past few years have been good to Asian-American families: they are erasing the financial disparity with white households faster than black and Hispanic families. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis took a look at the Survey of Consumer Finances to tease out the interplay of race and financial health.
If you spend a lot of time reading economics papers—and who doesn’t?—you’ve probably noticed that there are a lot more equations and charts between the abstract and the conclusion these days.
Coming out of the financial crisis, it seemed pretty clear that banks needed size to survive. But now the little guys are catching up.
Jillian Berman at the Huffington Post has a very nice story on the mental benefits of volunteering. She discusses a paper from Switzerland and a study from a trio of Ivy League researchers that suggest volunteering can make you feel like you have more time, and ease stress. Berman also describes her own experiences, helping out Sundays at a Brooklyn non-profit:
