market news

New Home Sales and Post Covid Life

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new home sales housing us

Here is a quick bit of news to inform how you look at investing and personal finance moving into a post-Covid world. New Home Sales Rise New home sales were up 19% annually. That is much more than predicted by analysts. There are few trends pushing the higher home sales and those same trends are worth noting across your investing. Covid knocked down the home buying market to basically zero, as showings were banned. Covid also made people more conservative and protective of their finances. Staying put seemed easier and less risky than trying to move. But… Now, as things move toward a post Covid mindset, buyers are looking for new homes. However, there is a very low supply of existing homes on the market, so one of the easy ways to buy a house is to buy new. That means that what existing homes do go on the market are selling for asking price or higher, and selling quickly because of all the demand. This is good news because that experience will lead others out of their cocoon to sell. This news obviously helps home builders, although that still remains a very risky investment. See Is Zelle Safe on …

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Trump, Iran, and the Markets

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The stock markets aren’t sure what to do anymore about Donald Trump. As it turns out, many of the things the market thought would be devastating (trade war with China) weren’t as big of deal as originally thought. Add to that the fact that Trump changes his mind on a regular basis for no particular reason, and you have a stock market that just sort of guesses. Big news today is that the Trump administration is pulling the waivers for countries over the Iran oil sanctions. Say what? So, Trump decided he had some sort of goal with Iran that involved oil sanctions against Iran. Typically, this is what American Presidents do when they are upset with Iran. Rather than bombing them, you cut off their ability to sell oil The catch is that the world oil market is really one big pool of suppliers and cutting any of the supply into that pool raises oil prices. Most countries, especially America, aren’t real fond of higher oil prices, so the sanction thing is sort of a double-edged sword. Enter waivers. When the Trump administration put its sanctions on Iran, they made sure to tell everyone, because that is how you …

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Ratings Agency Downgrades British Petroleum

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Recently, we talked about how Warren Buffet’s Congressional testimony about Moody’s responsibility for causing the banking crisis and stock market crash by rating collateral mortgage options (CMO) triple-A up until it was already obvious to everyone that these investments were in trouble, was wrong headed. Today, the ratings agencies Fitch and Moody’s gave us all another reason to wonder why we listen to rating agencies at all with its downgrade of British Petroleum. It is not that downgrading BP is incorrect. It is both the timing and the sanctimonious nature of how the downgrades British Petroleum (BP plc – NYSE:BP) stock and debt came about. It has been six weeks since the April 20th explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the company’s stock has already fallen over 40% since the incident. Which has been a big hit on Members of Congress are calling for BP to put $20 billion into some sort of escrow fund out of concerns that the company may end up not being able to fully pay its legal obligations resulting from the massive gulf oil spill. Yet, both Moody’s and Fitch’s statements act like their concerns about BP are actually news to anyone. “Today’s …

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Yahoo Buys Associated Content

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There are plenty of other things Yahoo gets from buying Associated Content, not the least of which is a big fat swath of Internet real estate that ranks obscenely high in Google search results and Bing search results. A great deal of the traffic generated from these high ranking searches is monetized via, you guessed it, Google AdSense which pays content publishers based upon ads placed by Google on those websites. Yahoo, can now switch out those Google Ads and replace them with their own Yahoo Ads.