Friday Fact Pack! Low Earth Orbit Problems
By Hightower Las Vegas and RCG Economics on March 17, 2023
Time for atmospheric traffic cops? SpaceX satellite traffic has spiked:
As of Dec. 2022
Unemployment
The Las Vegas, Reno and Carson City metros are all at or above a 5.3 percent headline (U-3) unemployment rate:
As of Jan. 2023
Bank Bolstering
Eleven of the largest U.S. banks—including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo—announced Thursday they were depositing a combined $30 billion in the San Francisco-based First Republic Bank in an effort to bolster confidence in the nation’s mid-sized banks and assuage concerns about a bank run like the one that caused Silicon Valley Bank to fail last week.
The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that banks borrowed a record amount of money from the central bank over the past week as they sought to address liquidity concerns.
Market History
“In 1907, amid rising interest rates and a declining stock market, two New York bankers attempted to corner the stock of a copper company. Their scheme collapsed, and depositors at the banks that backed them pulled their money. One bank, Knickerbocker Trust, lacked the capital to withstand the bank run and, four days later, shut down. The rout was on.” So begins this great newsletter write-up from Scott Galloway.
His graph of the biggest crashes:
As of March 2023
Gold
The price ofgold has been rallying along with the U.S dollar. It’s unusual, likely indicating a rush into “safe haven” assets after last week’s bank scare.
As of 3/16/23
Retail
Retail sales declined overall last month over January. Contributor data:
As of 2/28/23
RE
Realtor.com reliably offers weekly data on the existing home market, and their most recent report from Chief Economist Danielle Hale (Weekly Housing Trends View — Data Week Ending Mar 11, 2023) shows active inventory growth in the U.S. continued to climb with the number of for-sale homes up 61 percent over a year ago.
New listings–a measure of sellers putting homes up for sale–were again down, this week by 18 percent from one year ago. For the past 36 weeks, fewer homeowners had put their homes on the market for sale than at the same time one year ago.
Source: Calculated Risk – As of Jan. 2023
Apartment Construction
As many renters face a growing affordability crisis, the latest report from Apartment List shows that apartment construction remains strong: There are nearly 1 million apartments under construction across the nation, more than at any point since 1970 — and 679,000 were permitted for construction in 2022, an increase of 9 percent compared to 2021.
In the Las Vegas metro, 3,867 new apartments and 9,205 new single-family homes were permitted last year. On a per-capita basis, this ranks Vegas #20 out of the nation’s 50 largest metros.
As of Dec. 2022
Household Spending
Hawaii is the state with the highest household spending on housing and utilities, with 21.82 percent of the average person’s outgoings going toward those items, per a new study conducted by Texas real estate experts TexasRealEstateSource.com which examined personal spending data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Colorado came in second, and Nevada, where, on average, $8,772 of the average personal expenditure of $44,831 goes towards housing and utilities, which is roughly 19.5 percent, ranked third.
As of Dec. 2022
Auto Loan Problems
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans have taken on significantly more debt to buy vehicles. This is especially true for Gen Z and Millennials, who the Federal Reserve believes may have borrowed beyond their means.
In this infographic, VisualCapitalist.com used data from the Fed’s most recent consumer debt update to show that 18- to 29- year-olds are out over their financial skis and defaulting on loans:
As of March 2023
Table:
Source: Visual Capitalist – As of March 2023
STEM Stats
Graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics – STEM for short – are sought after globally but often are in short supply. Many countries have tried to bolster enrollment in STEM to aid important growth industries like med-tech, digital services, mobility or computer sciences — with varying success.
According to numbers collected by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, tertiary students in Malaysia and Tunisia are among the most likely to graduate in a STEM field. India is producing the most graduates in total due to its population of around 1.4 billion people (the largest in the world).
Other countries with a strong showing of STEM graduates are the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Belarus and South Korea – all producing more than 30 percent STEM graduates.
As of Dec. 2022
(Note: UNESCO did not publish data for China. In 2016, the World Economic Forum said China actually produced 4.7 million STEM graduates, which would exceed India’s number — but the National Science Foundation says China classifies engineering and science fields quite broadly, leading to a lack of comparability in the data. The U.S. government agency counted 1.6 million Chinese science and engineering graduates in 2014, which would be fewer than India.)
Sleep Stats
As of Dec. 2022
Richest of the Rich
From VisualCapitalist.com, Elon is No. 2 in the world and Nevada’s own Miriam Adelson is 5th among female billionaires:
As of Feb. 27, 2023
On the Horizon
Mike PeQueen: Next week’s most important economic event will be the Fed’s decision on interest rates coming out at 11 a.m. Pacific time on Wednesday. Prior to the Silicon Valley Bank failure, it was expected that the Fed would hike rates by 50 basis points, and they still may — but the potential for contraction in commercial loans has caused many to call for a smaller hike or no hike at all. The Fed’s press conference after the release will be a must watch for investors.
Next week’s MarketWatch calendar:
