Home sales rebounded last month to highest level since 2005, shocking even the Realtors
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Pending home sales surprised the experts, rising 8% in May
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Realtors point to lower mortgage rates for some of the sales gains.
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Pending sales were strongest in the Northeast and West.
The pandemic-induced housing boom may not be over quite yet. Despite recent months of softening sales, buyers came back remarkably strongly in May.
Pending home sales, a measure of signed contracts on existing homes, jumped an unexpectedly high 8% in May compared with April, according to the National Association of Realtors. Analysts expected a 1% drop. This is the highest level of sales activity for May since 2005.
Sales were up 13% from May 2020, when the housing market was just beginning to come back from the coronavirus lockdown. Pending contracts are a forward-looking indicator of closed home sales.
Inflation Eats at Surging U.S. Pay With Biden Plans at Stake
Americans are enjoying outsized pay boosts this year from desperate employers, but the raises are failing to keep pace with surging prices for everyday goods. U.S. wages likely posted a third strong monthly gain to fuel a 3.6% increase in June from a year earlier, according to economists’ forecasts ahead of the Labor Department’s jobs report due Friday. Companies including FedEx Corp. and Olive G…
Fed Unity Cracks as Inflation Rises and Officials Debate Future
Federal Reserve officials spoke with one voice throughout the pandemic downturn, promising that monetary policy would be set to full-stimulus mode until the crisis was well and truly behind America. Suddenly, they are less in sync.
Central bankers are increasingly divided over how to think about and respond to emerging risks after months of rising asset values and faster-than-expected price increases. While their political counterparts in the White House have been more unified in maintaining that the recent jump in price gains will fade as the economy gets past a reopening burst, Washington as a whole is wrestling with how to approach policy at a moment of intense uncertainty.
The Fed’s top officials, including Chair Jerome H. Powell, acknowledge that a lasting period of uncomfortably high inflation is a possibility. But they have said it is more likely that recent price increases, which have come as the economy reopens from its coronavirus slumber, will fade.
Other officials, like James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, have voiced more pointed concern that the pickup in prices might persist and have suggested that the Fed may need to slow its support for the economy more quickly as a result.
Now Prices Are Really Soaring: June Rent Jump Is Biggest On Record.
“While soaring housing costs had put homeownership out of reach for most Americans, rents had been relatively tame for much of 2020. But in recent months, rents have also soared as vaccines fuel optimism about a rebound from the pandemic, and a reversal in the city-to-suburbs exodus. The increases, as Bloomberg so eloquently puts it, ‘may add to concerns about inflation pressures.’”
GAS PRICES HIT SEVEN YEAR HIGH AS STATIONS RUN LOW ON FUEL AHEAD OF JULY FOURTH.
Is the Fed Getting Burned Again?