Succinct Summation of the Week's Events

Succinct Summation of the Week’s Events:

Positives,

1)The Fed cut rates by 25 bps to 3.75-4% as fully expected and I believe Powell did the right thing shifting the market to closer to 50/50 from what was considered a market lock for a December cut as after all, they are now at a 1% REAL rate which their own dot plot says is the longer run neutral rate.

2)At least for now, some calm in the US/China trade relationship.

3)Javier Milei’s party in Argentina wins the midterms and free market capitalism is given a further chance there. Hopefully there will be no better repudiation of socialism than a successful Javier Milei for the Argentinian economy.

4)According to Apartment List in the seasonally slow period ahead of the holidays, rents fell .8% m/o/m and they said “It’s likely that we’ll continue to see further modest rent declines to close out the year.” Rents were down .9% y/o/y. The vacancy rate ticked up by one tenth to 7.2%, a new high since they started calculating it in 2017. “We’re past the peak of a multifamily construction surge, but a healthy supply of new units are still hitting the market and colliding with sluggish demand, causing vacancies to continue trending up.”

5)Good for first time home buyers, according to S&P Cotality (a switch from CoreLogic) Case-Shiller, home prices nationally in August rose 1.5% y/o/y, the slowest pace since July 2023 (which only slowed after the 2021-2022 spike).

6)From Amazon: Overall revenue growth was 12% y/o/y with AWS accelerating to 20.2%, “our largest growth rate in 11 quarters.”

7)From Apple: On the December quarter, “We expect iPhone revenue to grow double digits y/o/y, which would be our best iPhone quarter ever.”

8)Google killed it again as did Microsoft and Meta but wow that spend.

9)From Visa: “When we look at quarterly spend category data in the US, we saw broad based strength, including improvements in retail services and goods, travel and fuel. Both discretionary and non-discretionary spend were up from Q3. And growth across consumer spend bands remained relatively consistent with Q3 with the highest spend band continuing to grow the fastest.”