Fact Pack!

By Hightower Las Vegas and RCG Economics on April 12, 2024

Last week’s Consumer Price Index report showed year-over-year inflation of 3.5 percent in March, 0.1 percent higher than expectations.

As of 4/9/24

Trend:

As of March 2024

Inflation in the EU was 2.4 percent in March, a dip from February.

The upshot? The European Central Bank will likely make interest-rate cuts sooner than the Fed, and most U.S. market analysts now think the Fed won’t reduce rates in June as previously thought:

As of 4/10/24

Jobs

For week ending April 6, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 211,000, a decrease of 11,000 from the previous week’s revised level. The 4-week moving average was 214,250, a decrease of 250 from the previous week’s revised average.

As of 4/6/23

Credit Card Delinquency

U.S. credit-card delinquency rates have hit a 10-year high:

Nearly 3.5 percent of card balances were at least 30 days past due at the end of December, per the Philadelphia Fed. That’s the highest figure since 2012.

About 10 percent of borrowers now have an account balance that exceeds $5,200 and credit scores are getting worse, on average.

A larger share of card holders is making only the minimum payment while unpaid balances rise:

As of December 2023

Southern Nevada Home Sales

A report released Tuesday by Las Vegas REALTORS^® (LVR) shows local home prices are on the rise so far this year.
 
LVR reported that the median price of existing single-family homes sold in Southern Nevada through its Multiple Listing Service (MLS) during March was $465,000. That’s up 9.4% from $425,000 in March of 2023.

Local home prices are still below the all-time record of $482,000 set in May of 2022.
 
The median price of local condos and townhomes sold in March was $282,500, up 8.7% from $260,000 in March 2023. That’s approaching the all-time high of $287,000 set in August of 2022.
 
By the end of March, LVR reported 3,323 single-family homes listed for sale without any sort of offer. That’s down 20.8% from one year earlier. Meanwhile, the 1,179 condos and townhomes listed without offers in March represent a 6.9% increase from one year earlier.
 
LVR reported 2,672 existing local homes, condos and townhomes sold in March. Compared to March 2023, sales were down 11.8% for homes and down 1.8% for condos and townhomes. The sales pace in March equates to less than a two-month housing supply, similar to one year ago.
 
According to LVR, 2023 was the slowest year for existing local home sales since 2008. LVR reported 29,069 sales of existing local homes, condos, and townhomes in 2023. That was down from 35,584 in 2022. That in turn followed a record year for existing local home sales in 2021, when LVR reported 50,010 properties were sold.

Inventory

Housing inventory is on the rise:

As of March 2023

Data source: Realtor.com 

Immigration

The number of foreign-born people in the U.S. rose by more than 5 million over 10 years to 45.3 million or 13.7 percent of the nation’s population, according to the 2018-2022 5-year American Community Survey (ACS) estimates. 

Immigrants made up more than a fifth of the population in four states:

California (26.5%)
New Jersey (23.2%)
New York (22.6%)
Florida (21.1%)

In Nevada, the number was 19.1 percent.

A new Census Bureau visualization explores where immigrants lived in the United States and how it changed between the two five-year periods at the national, state and county level:

As of 2022

Other highlights from the Census Bureau:

New Mexico was the only state whose foreign-born population decreased during the 10-year period.

Almost half (49.1%) of all immigrants in the U.S. entered the country before 2000.

An estimated 63.5% were employed, with more than a third of the civilian employed foreign-born population (16 years and older) in management, business, science, and arts occupations.

Immigration and the Labor Market

Economists usually point to the benefits of immigration in terms of long-term impact on productivity, but the latest CBO data shows new workers can also offer a short-term boost to an economy that is struggling.

An analysis published earlier this week showed that post-pandemic pickup in immigration accounted for at least one-fifth of the increase in U.S. gross domestic product since the end of 2019.

As of 2023

(Note: New immigration numbers released in February by the Congressional Budget Office showed that other government agencies likely have been undercounting the population growth driven by migrants over the past couple years as border crossings increased. The CBO estimated that immigration added 3.3 million people to the U.S. population on net in 2023, a number 1.7 million higher than the Census Bureau’s latest figures.)

Crude

Crude oil prices have been on the rise amid ongoing output cuts by OPEC+ and because of regional tensions related to the Israel-Hamas and Ukraine-Russian wars.

As of 4/12/24

Visualizing the Growth of $100

Data from Aswath Damodaran at NYU Stern on the growth of $100 invested in different asset classes from 1970 to 2023 shows that the S&P 500 has outperformed other major asset classes by a wide margin over the past five decades, outpacing U.S. 10-year Treasury bonds by almost tenfold since 1970:

Source: Visual Capitalist As of December 2023

Libraries

National Library Week, observed during the second full week of April, promotes literacy, along with support for and use of the nation’s libraries. Employment of librarians and media collections specialists was 133,760 in May 2023, accounting for fewer than 1 of every 1,000 U.S. jobs:

As of May 2023

Grid Problems

It’s been more than one-hundred years since the world’s first power plant, a tiny, coal-powered generator that delivered electricity to lower Manhattan, was fired up. Since then, the U.S. power grid has grown to become the biggest on Earth, with 1 million megawatts of capacity linked by more than 600,000 miles of transmission lines, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Though that sounds impressive, at least 1 million U.S. homes are at risk of electrical fire because of unstable voltage outputs — surges that amount to dangerous power quality.

Between 2015 and 2019, fire departments responded to an average 46,700 home fires a year involving some kind of electrical failure, according to data from the National Fire Protection Association. All in all, the average annual cumulative property damage was about $1.5 billion. Bloomberg Green has the story.

Population

According to data and forecasting from the UN World Population Prospects (2022), China’s population boom has likely ended. The country reported two consecutive years of decreases (population was down 850,000 in 2022, and 2.1 million in 2023). China’s population in 2050 is forecasted to be 1.32 billion, about the same as it was in 2007.

The UN projects that India’s population will peak in the mid 2060s, just shy of the 1.7 billion mark. Visual Capitalist graphic: