Economic Week In Review

• Consumer Confidence fell from 65.9 to 62.3, lowest level since early 90’s.(Tuesday)

• FOMC Announcement-Fed lowered interest rates by .25%, to 2%. ,
• NAPM Chicago Index came in at 48.3. The report also showed that increasing costs of raw materials continues to be a problem. MBA Purchase Applications fell 4.8%.
• GDP came in at an annualized rate of 2.6% barely keeping us out of the official recessiondefinition.
• Employment Cost Index rose .7% in the 1st quarter, meaning real wages are not rising very much.(Wednesday)

• Jobless Claims, came in at 380,000, jumping by 35,000.
• ISM Manufacturing Index steady at 48.6 pointing to a slight contraction in business conditions.
• Personal Income and Outlays Personal income came in at .3% and consumer spending at .4%(Thursday)

• Employment Situation-The unemployment rate fell from 5.1 to 5.0%.(non-farm payrolls)(Friday)

• Bonds…2 year 2.45%, 5 yr. 3.17% and the 10 yr. 3.86%.
• Crude oil finished at $116.32 per barrel, despite some strength in the dollar.

Of note this week:

The Dow finished the day up 48 points to close above 13,000 to 13,058. The S&P 500 closed up 5 points, near a 4 month high at 1414 and the Nasdaq closed lower by 8 points to 2477.

The Fed lowered the Fed Funds rate by 25 basis points to 2% and gave every indication that it’s done lowering rates for a while. This rate decrease represents the 7th consecutive rate deduction. Inflation and the strength of the dollar will be top on the Fed’s list for a while.

On the mortgage side rates are holding steady as is the London Interbank or Libor rate. Good news for those people with adjustable rate mortgages, as you can see above interest rates remained virtually unchanged from last week’s numbers.

Interesting interview with home builder Eli Broad who believes it will take 3 more years to deplete the current housing inventory and that home prices will fall another 20% before this is all over……..let’s hope he’s wrong!

Overall not a very exciting week after all!

The Economic Week Ahead:

• Pending Homes Index,(Wednesday)

• Jobless Claims , Chain Store Sales, Bank of England (BOE) Announcement(Thursday)

• International Trade(Friday)

Have a great weekend!

This entry was posted on 3. May 2008 at 01:28 and is filed under Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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