December 2024 saw the pace at which carbon dioxide accumulates in the Earth's atmosphere reach a new record high.

Measured as the trailing twelve month average of the year-over-year change in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory, December 2024's pace of CO₂ accumulation was 3.53 parts per million. This rate surpasses the previous record of 3.49 parts per million set in January 2017.

That older record had been boosted by the very strong El Niño event of 2015-16 and the related massive Indonesian wildfires of 2016.

2024 saw another very strong El Niño event, but unlike 2016, did not see wildfires on a similar scale. What makes 2024 different is the growth of carbon dioxide emissions in China, which surpasses all other industrialized and developing nations by a wide and growing margin.

The following chart presents the trailing twelve month average of the year-over-year change in the pace of carbon dioxide accumulation in the Earth's atmosphere from January 2000 through December 2024.

In terms of world history, China is on pace to become the largest national contributor of carbon dioxide to the Earth's atmosphere before the end of the 2020s.

References

Global Carbon Project. Global Carbon Budget 2024. 13 November 2024. Preprint DOI: 10.5194/essd-2024-519.

Global Carbon Project. Supplemental data of Global Carbon Budget 2024 (Version 1.0) [Data set]. Global Carbon Project. 13 November 2024. DOI: 10.18160/gcp-2024.

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth System Research Laboratory. Mauna Loa Observatory CO2 Data. [Online Data]. Updated 5 January 2025. Accessed 9 January 2025.

Image credit: NASA. Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Tagged by Source, Australasia. 16 June 2023. "This view highlights CO2 sources and sinks over Asia and Australia. The most notable feature is fossil fuel emissions from China, which contribute to the increasing atmospheric burden of CO2 over the course of 2021."

The total value of goods traded between the United States, China, and the rest of the world remained depressed in November 2024.

That trend was most evident in the numbers for trade between the U.S. and China. Here, we find that while the year-over-year value of goods exchanged between the two nations in November 2024 was nominally positive, thanks largely to U.S. soybean exports that peak during the fourth quarter of each year, the trailing twelve month average that smooths out seasonal variation was barely changed.

Consequently, the gap between the trailing twelve month average and a counterfactual based on how trade between the U.S. and China recovered following the 2008-09 Great Recession increased to its largest value on record in November 2024.

As the following chart reveals, after the post-Coronavirus Pandemic trade recovery began in September 2020, the difference between the counterfactual and the trailing twelve month average was small up through October 2022, when the Biden-Harris administration imposed severe anti-free trade measures against China. Through November 2024, we estimate the cumulative loss of trade between the U.S. and China has surpassed $311 billion.

The Biden-Harris administration's anti-free trade measures were not limited to China. The next chart shows how trade between the U.S. and world, both with and without trade with China, was also diminished after the administration imposed trade restrictions in January 2023.

Here, we estimate the cumulative loss of trade with respect to a straight-line projection of how trade between the U.S. and the world excluding China (shown by the light blue data series) was growing from October 2022 to February 2023. The cumulative loss of trade between the U.S. and the world excluding China since January 2023 totals nearly $563 billion, with November 2024 posting a gap of $35 billion.

As the Biden-Harris administration reaches its end, it's worth tallying up the extent to which it impaired global trade. Especially since the administration will impose further export restrictions on China and other nations before it finally leaves office on 20 January 2025.

References

U.S. Census Bureau. Trade in Goods with China. Last updated: 5 January 2025.

U.S. Census Bureau. Trade in Goods with World, Not Seasonally Adjusted. Last updated: 5 January 2025.

Image credit: Photo of a large cargo ship by Chris Linnett on Unsplash.

There are very few long-running products with decades of history that are fundamentally the same as they were when they first introduced to the market. Campbell's Tomato Soup is one of them, with a history that stretches back to the final years of the nineteenth century.

2025 marks the 128th year in which Americans can go to a grocery store and buy a can of Campbell's condensed tomato soup. When the Campbell's Company (NYSE: CPB) first produced the product, it was revolutionary. John Dorrance's innovation of condensing soup, removing water while preserving the flavor, made it possible to produce, can, store, and ship much larger quantities of soup than ever before. Consumers only needed to pour the contents of the can into a pot on their stove and add water to transform it into their next meal.

Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup quickly became the most popular of the first soups the company produced and shipped to grocery stores across the entire United States by train and truck. Today, it is Campbell's second-most popular soup, selling around 84 million cans a year and lagging only behind the company's equally iconic Chicken Noodle Soup, which was introduced in the 1930s.

In 1898, consumers could buy a Number 1 (10.75 oz) size can of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup for just 10 cents. Today, consumers can walk into a Walmart and buy the exact same size can of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup for $1.26.

The consistency of Campbell's Tomato Soup as a product over the 128 years it has been available for consumers to buy makes it an ideal product to follow to understand how inflation has affected the prices Americans pay at the grocery store. There's no "shrinkflation" for marketers to hide the price increases that have taken place for the product over time.

Political Calculations has documented the typical price Americans have paid for a single iconic can of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup in each month starting from January 1898 by going through more than twelve decades worth of archived newspapers and advertising circulars to identify the prices at which grocers have put them on sale. Today we're updating that price history in our chart visualizing that history from January 1898 through January 2025.

We find the prevailing average sale price for this food product over the past 12 months is $1.28 per can, which is 3.2% higher than what we found a year earlier. The rate at which the price of a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup has been inflating in recent years has slowed, but has not stopped escalating.

The 2025 average price of a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup is about 35% higher than the trailing 12 month average of $0.95 per can we recorded in January 2022.

During this time, we've seen discounted sales of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup become both smaller and less frequent. Before March 2021, which marks Month 0 for when President Biden's inflation was unleashed upon the U.S. economy, it was rare to see the regular sale price of a can of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup above one dollar. In January 2025, the lowest price at which American consumers can expect to pay for a can when they find it is the $1.25 price at Food Lion grocery stores, which is discounted from a regular price of $1.58 per can.

Here's the January 2025 update for our periodic sampling of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup sale prices at 10 major U.S. grocery-selling retailers, where we're indicated the change in price since our last update in October 2024:

• Walmart: $1.26/each, unchanged
• Amazon: $2.19/each, increase of $0.20 (+10%)
• Kroger: $1.39/each, unchanged
• Walgreens: $1.99/each, unchanged
• Target: $1.39/each, unchanged
• CVS: $2.49/each, unchanged
• Albertsons: $1.49/each, unchanged
• Food Lion: $1.25/each, unchanged
• H-E-B: $1.31/each, unchanged
• Meijer: $1.29/each, unchanged

Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup costs about 12.8 times more than the original price American grocery shoppers paid when Campbell's began selling their just-invented condensed soup products in 1898. Because its price history now spans more than a full order of magnitude, showing the price history in logarithmic scale gives a better sense of how much and when inflation has affected the prices American consumers pay for a can of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup.

The escalation of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup since March 2021 is consistent with how food prices have generally changed over this time.

Previously on Political Calculations

Political Calculations' analysis of Campbell's Tomato Soup dates back to 2015! Along the way, we've filled in the gaps we had in the historic price data and have explored America's second-most popular soup from a lot of different angles.

• The Price of Campbell's Tomato Soup Since 1897 (2015)
• The Tomato Soup Standard (2015)
• The First Ad Ever for Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup (2015)
• War and Soup (2015)
• Working Backwards from Retail to Cost (2015)
• Early Advertising Milestones for Campbell's Condensed Soups
• Updated: The Price of Campbell's Tomato Soup Since 1897 (2016)
• Everyday Low Prices (2017)
• Soup and Recession (2017)
• Soup and Steel Tariffs (2018)
• Tomato Soup, Oil and Inflation (2018)
• Celebrating 150 Years of the Campbell's Soup Company (2019)
• The Price History of Campbell's Tomato Soup (2020)
• Campbell's Tomato Soup Sales Soar as Americans prep for Home Quarantines (2020)
• Campbell's Soup Presents "The Magic Shelf" (2020)
• The Price of Campbell's Tomato Soup in the Coronavirus Pandemic (2021)
• The Pandemic Price Escalation of Campbell's Tomato Soup (2021)
• Shrinkflation and a New Tool to Track Price Inflation in Real Time (2021)
• Absence of Discounts Confirms Tomato Soup Inflation (2021)
• The Ship of Theseus and Campbell's Tomato Soup (2021)
• The S&P 500 and Campbell's Tomato Soup (2021)
• Upward Price Pressure at the Start of Soup Season (2021)
• Recent Price Trends for Campbell's Tomato Soup (2021)
• The Price History of Campbell's Tomato Soup (2022)
• Campbell's Tomato Soup Prices Explode Higher (2022)
• Major Grocers Continue Hiking Tomato Soup Prices (2022)
• Campbell's Tomato Soup Prices Keep Escalating (2022)
• Campbell's Soup to See Third Wave of Price Increases (2022)
• Amazon Hikes Campbell's Tomato Soup Prices (2022)
• Cost of Campbell's Tomato Soup Keeps Rising (2022)
• The Price History of Campbell's Tomato Soup (2023)
• Inflation Slows for Campbell's Tomato Soup (2023)
• Campbell's Tomato Soup Prices Stabilizing at Inflated Level (2023)
• The Price History of Campbell's Tomato Soup (2024)
• Campbell's Tomato Soup Price Resumes Inflationary Rise
• Tomato Soup Points to Continuing Slow Inflation
• Tomato Soup Prices Largely Stable at Elevated Level
• The Price History of Campbell's Tomato Soup (2025)

Image credit: Photo of cans of Campbell's Tomato Soup at Walmart on January 7, 2025 by Iron Man on Unsplash.

The trifecta of two major hurricanes and rising mortgage rates continued to negatively impact the market for new homes in the United States in November 2024. Widespread damage from Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the southeastern U.S. depressed new home sales in the region. Meanwhile, mortgage rates remained high during November 2024 despite the Federal Reserve's action to cut interest rates on 7 November, putting a further damper on new home sales outside the hurricane damaged area.

There was a silver lining in that the median and average sale prices of new homes decreased in November 2024. Initial estimates put the median sale price of a new home sold at $402,600, down $23,000 from October's level. Meanwhile, the average sale price of a new home sold dropped over $40,000 to $484,800.

The combination of reduced new home sales and falling prices lowered the market capitalization of the U.S. new home market. Our initial estimate of the time-shifted trailing twelve month average of the total value of new homes sold during November 2024 is $27.52 billion, which falls below October 2024's revised market cap estimate of $28.15 billion. Downward revisions in previous months confirm the U.S. new home market cap remains substantially below its December 2020 peak.

The three following charts present the trends for the U.S. new home market capitalization, the number of new home sales, and their sale prices as measured by their time-shifted, trailing twelve month averages from January 1976 through November 2024.

New home sales dip:

Prices decline, but still elevated:

Despite falling prices, new homes remained unaffordable because mortgage rates continued climbing in November 2024. After bottoming at an average of 6.18% in September 2024, the average conventional 30-year fixed rate mortgage in the U.S. carried an average interest rate of 6.81% in November 2024.

The following chart reveals new homes remained fully unaffordable by the typical American household in November 2024:

Consequently, the new home affordability crisis powered into its 32nd consecutive month.

References

U.S. Census Bureau. New Residential Sales Historical Data. Houses Sold. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 23 December 2024. 

U.S. Census Bureau. New Residential Sales Historical Data. Median and Average Sale Price of Houses Sold. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 23 December 2024. 

Freddie Mac. 30-Year Fixed Rate Mortgages Since 1971. [Online Database]. Accessed 3 January 2025. Note: Starting from December 2022, the estimated monthly mortgage rate is taken as the average of weekly 30-year conventional mortgage rates recorded during the calendar month.

Image Credit: Microsoft Bing Image Generator. Prompt: "A log cabin with a sign that says 'NEW HOME FOR SALE' in front of it".

2025 has begun the way 2024 ended. With investors doing their best to determine what direction stock prices will go during the next year.

As the year gets underway, expectations of how the U.S. Federal Reserve will be setting stock prices continues to be the dominant factor affecting how far forward in time investors are focusing their attention. At this writing, the CME Group's FedWatch Tool continues to anticipate just one rate cut in all of 2025 in its full-year forecast. The only projected rate cut currently on the radar is a 0.25% reduction in the Federal Funds Rate on 7 May (2025-Q2).

That expectation puts the second quarter of 2025 directly in the long range scopes of investors. The final update to the alternative futures chart for 2024-Q4 confirms the level of stock prices is tracking within the lower end of the expected range associated with investors focusing their forward-looking attention on this distant future quarter.

As the first trading days of 2025 have passed, the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) closed out the two past holiday-shortened trading weeks at 5,942.47, up just 11.60 points or 0.2% from the index' level two weeks earlier.

Which is to say the random onset of new information during the past two weeks has done little to affect investor expectations for the future of stock prices. Here are market moving headlines we noted during these two weeks.

Monday, 23 December 2024

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US new home sales rebound in November after hurricane drag
• Shrinking US bar tabs signal little festive cheer for liquor makers
• Oil prices ease on surplus concerns, dollar strength
• Plan to throttle foreign fossil fuel finance collapses at OECD, Bloomberg reports
• Signs of growth, such as it is, developing in China:
• Chinese media hail consumption boost even as caution spurs rentals, not buying
• Bigger trouble developing in Eurozone, ECB minions thinking they could change gears and cut interest rates further:
• Europe's embattled auto sector plans plant closures and layoffs
• Europe's energy taxes are worsening industry woes, power CEO says
• Lagarde says ECB very close to reaching its inflation goal, FT reports
• Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq trade mixed on the holiday-shortened trading week
• S&P 500, Nasdaq gain in choppy trading as most megacaps move higher
• Apple approaches $4 trillion valuation as investors bet on AI momentum

Tuesday, 24 December 2024

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Oil prices rise 1% in thin pre-holiday trade
• Bigger stimulus developing in China:
• China to ramp up fiscal support for consumption next year
• BOJ minions say next year is the one they'll finally hit their inflation target for Japan:
• BOJ's Ueda expects further progress in hitting price target next year
• Wall Street ends higher as Santa rally begins

Thursday, 26 December 2024

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Oil prices ease as markets weigh China stimulus hopes
• New US jobless claims slip, but people are remaining unemployed for longer
• Bigger stimulus, bailouts developing in China:
• Exclusive: China plans record $411 billion special treasury bond issuance next year
• China Stimulus Pledges All Pledge to Recapitalize State Banks
• Wall Street ends topsy-turvy session mixed, putting Santa rally under pressure
• Dow ends up to extend win run to five; rising yields pressure megacap stocks
• With the new year upon us, a look back at Wall Street's Santa rallies since 2000

Friday, 27 December 2024

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• U.S. Inflation Has Turned 'Sticky', Reducing Odds For Rate Cuts
• Intel leads 2024 tech layoffs, but sector lays off 43% less year over year
• US homelessness rose by record 18% in latest annual data
• BOJ minions quantify how much they think their future rate hikes will hurt Japan's businesses:
• BOJ produces estimates on how future rate hikes affect earnings
• Inflation in Japan's capital accelerates, keeps rate hike prospects intact
• Yen gains as some BOJ policymakers see rate hike soon
• Wall St finishes down after sell-off at end of strong holiday-shortened week
• Wall Street bounces back in Christmas week, with S&P on track for banner year

Monday, 30 December 2024

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Oil rises on diesel demand boost in sparse holiday trade
• US credit card defaults jump to highest level since 2010
• Mixed economic signs developing in China:
• Chinese youth flock to civil service, but slow economy puts 'iron rice bowl' jobs at risk
• China's Dec manufacturing activity seen expanding for third month: Reuters poll
• Less bad trouble developing in Japan:
• Japan's factory activity shrinks at slower pace, PMI shows
• Bigger trouble developing in South Korea:
• South Korea November factory output falls more sharply than expected
• Nasdaq, S&P, and Dow sink alongside Treasury yields as 2025 approaches
• Wall St slides to 1-week low on thin trading, elevated yields
• Wall Street to close on Jan 9 to honor President Jimmy Carter

Tuesday, 31 December 2024

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Oil prices up 2% on China optimism as investors return from holiday
• US oil executives expect faster permitting under Trump, says Dallas Fed
• US oil production rose to record high in October, EIA data shows
• Oil prices post 3% annual decline, slipping for second year in a row
• Bigger trouble, stimulus developing in China:
• China’s Economy Is Burdened by Years of Excess. Here’s How Bad It Really Is
• China's Xi expects 2024 GDP growth of around 5%, state media says
• China's Xi pledges more proactive economic policies in 2025
• Wall Street ends lower, capping a banner year
• Stocks end strong year with a whimper as yields apply pressure
• Without the largest 6 stocks, indices would have returned much less – here is how much

Thursday, 2 January 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Oil prices settle up on China optimism as investors return from holiday
• US weekly jobless claims hit eight-month low as labor market remains resilient
• US 30-year fixed-rate mortgage flirts with 7%
• The Fed Is Cutting - Why Are Mortgage Rates Going Up?
• Bigger trouble, stimulus developing in China:
• Growth in China's factory activity slows, Caixin PMI shows
• Wall Street reverses course, erases nearly 1% gain in volatile first trading day of 2025
• US equity inflows cool on higher bond yields

Friday, 3 January 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US manufacturing PMI rises to nine-month high in December
• US new car sales rose to five-year high in 2024, helped by hybrids
• Fed minions say the year ahead looks great, although they'll keep interest rates higher for longer because of persistent Bidenflation:
• Fed's Barkin: Year-ahead outlook positive, with upside risk
• Fed policy may need to stay restrictive for longer due to inflation risk, Barkin says
• Bigger trouble, stimulus developing in China:
• Trouble in China's shopping paradise as Hainan duty-free spending tumbles
• China will sharply increase funding from treasury bonds to spur growth in 2025
• China’s central bank says it will cut banks reserves, rates at proper time
• China gives government workers first big pay bump in a decade to boost economy
• Wall Street shakes off recent weakness, snaps longest losing streak since April
• Wall St rises on tech boost, policy changes in focus

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tool's projection of the real GDP growth rate for the current quarter of 2024-Q4 declined to +2.4% from the pre-Christmas holiday week's +3.1% annualized growth estimate.

In our next edition, we'll roll the alternative futures chart forward to provide a first look at the potential levels of the S&P 500 through 2025-Q1. On another programming note, this is the first of two editions of the S&P 500 chaos series that we anticipate will span a two week long period in 2025. The second will come during the middle of the summer doldrums and will cover the last week of July and first week of August 2025.

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull and bear discussing what direction to go in 2025".