The S&P 500 (Index: SPX) rose 0.8% above its previous week's close to end the trading week at 7,473.45 on Friday, 22 May 2026 as investors went into the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

In doing so, the index confirmed that stock prices have fully recovered from the Iran war impact. We find the trajectory of the S&P 500 falls very close to the central trend line of the redzone forecast range we added to the alternative futures chart back on 23 February 2026, several days ahead of when the geopolitical event began. For us, that timing has been fortunate because the redzone forecast range has been able to function as a counterfactual projection of how the S&P 500 would have changed if the Iran war geopolitical event had never happened.

So for the trajectory of stock prices to fall so neatly near the middle of that forecast range now that we're coming to its end is a strong confirmation the negative shock of the geopolitical event upon them has fully waned. Here is the latest update of the alternative futures chart that shows that outcome:

The redzone forecast range is based on the assumption investors would primarily focus on 2026-Q2 in making the decisions that set the trajectory of stock prices throughout its run. The Iran War geopolitical event didn't alter that focus throughout this period, but rather, added noise on top of the signal provided by the dividend futures-based model we use to forecast the S&P 500's future.

There are other factors that affect both the signal and noise investors consider in their decision making, which is provided from the random onset of new information. Here are the past week's market-moving headlines.

Monday, 18 May 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• China to buy at least $17 billion in US agricultural products annually, White House says
• Explainer: What do China's new US farm purchases mean for global trade?
• White House gets small rare earth win, but China's export regime is here to stay
• Trump returns from China with stability and a stalemate
• Oil prices rise 3% to two-week high on Iran war supply concerns
• How India's cooking fuel shortage is driving up California's gas prices
• Trump says he’s postponing ‘scheduled attack of Iran tomorrow’ at Middle East leaders’ request
• Former Fed minions claim size doesn't matter for some reason:
• Former Fed officials say size may not matter on balance sheet
• Bigger trouble developing in China:
• China's economy loses steam at start of second quarter
• "Shockingly Bad" Chinese Econ Data Stuns Wall Street, Sparks Hard Landing Concerns
• China's April oil throughput hits lowest since August 2022, inventories rise
• China's property investment extends decline in January-April
• Wall Street finished mixed as tech slid ahead of Nvidia earnings
• Nasdaq leads equity losses with oil, borrowing costs in focus
• Nasdaq posts back-to-back losses as Micron’s decline weighs down tech sector
• As bond yields surge, investors grow wary of a global spending crunch

Tuesday, 19 May 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US mortgage rates rise to 6.56%, MBA says
• Oil prices fall as Trump pauses Iran attack plans
• Fed minions told to stop bitterly clinging onto assets they bought, expected to avoid rate hikes in 2026:
• Warsh details first round of asset divestments
• U.S. Fed to avoid cutting rates this year; economists still say war-driven inflation is transitory
• Bigger trouble developing in China:
• China state refiners slash throughput on supply disruption, weak margins
• BOJ minions rethinking plan to reduce Japanese bond holdings as JapanGov minions gear up to borrow more:
• Japan's solid first-quarter GDP faces reality check as Iran war threatens economy
• Exclusive: Japan's extra budget to include funding from fresh debt
• BOJ could temper its taper as bond wobbles rattle markets
• Bigger trouble avoided in Eurozone:
• EU prepares to cut US import duties to avoid Trump tariff hike
• Wall Street closed lower as Treasury yields jumped amid inflation fears
• Wall St ends lower as inflation worries push up yields

Wednesday, 20 May 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• The AI bots are coming and the young are booing, not applauding
• As cocoa prices melt down, real chocolate is making a comeback
• Oil prices slide after Trump says US-Iran negotiations in 'final stages'
• Iran deal looks like a 30-day ceasefire extension - Eurasia Group
• Tankers exit Strait of Hormuz with 6 million barrels of crude oil
• Low unemployment streak revives debate over job market's new floor
• Fed minions outed for hiding their growing excitement for rate hikes:
• Fed minutes show more policymakers open to a rate hike
• Fed's Paulson says current policy appropriate, but 'healthy' to consider extended hold or hikes
• Bigger trouble, no stimulus developing in China:
• Exclusive: US not in a hurry to extend China trade truce, Bessent says
• China leaves lending benchmarks unchanged for 12th month in May
• BOJ minions coordinating with US on plan to hike Japan's interest rates:
• Bessent's support for BOJ may clear political hurdles for June hike
• Bigger trouble developing for the Eurozone, ECB minions gearing up to hike Eurozone interest rates:
• Europe must break China's grip on rare earths pricing to spur investment, sector body says
• ECB June rate hike case is nearly sealed but July is fully open, sources say
• Wall Street ended higher as investors eye possible U.S.-Iran deal and Nvidia earnings
• Wall St climbs 1% with chip stocks rallying before Nvidia results
• Only two sectors are driving the S&P 500 bull market higher since 2022

Thursday, 21 May 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US manufacturing activity rises to four-year high in May, S&P Global survey shows
• US energy storage additions hit a first-quarter record, report shows
• Oil prices close 2% lower on uncertain prospects for US-Iran deal
• Oil market could hit 'red zone' in July-August, IEA chief says
• Fed minions finding other things to worry about:
• Some Fed officials and staff are fretting about state of financial markets
• Fed proposes limited payment accounts for fintechs, others
• US Fed officials propose prolonging dollar swap lines to underpin stability
• Fed's Barkin: Policy in good place to respond to ongoing shocks
• BOJ minions / Bigger trouble developing in Japan:
• Japan exports rise for eighth month despite supply disruptions
• Japanese auto exports to Middle East plunge in April as war disrupts shipping
• Bigger trouble developing in Eurozone, ECB minions getting excited to hike Eurozone interest rates:
• Europe's economy hit hard as energy price shock stifles demand
• Euro zone growth set to slow in 2026 as Middle East conflict fuels inflation
• ECB's Rehn sees few signs yet of high inflation taking root
• S&P 500, Nasdaq eke out gains in volatile trading session
• Wall St indexes end slightly higher as investors focus on Mideast peace hopes

Friday, 22 May 2026

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US labor market shows resilience in face of war; housing still subdued
• Oil prices rise as investors doubt US-Iran peace talks breakthrough
• Fed minions backing off rate cut plans as new chief minion starts work:
• Fed's Waller's ready to axe 'easing bias,' says rate-cut talk now is 'crazy'
• Kevin Warsh is sworn in as Federal Reserve chair
• Level-setting the Warsh Fed, in Warsh's own words
• Bigger trouble developing in China:
• Chinese Refining Rates Unexpectedly Plunge To All-Time Lows As Economy Falls Off A Cliff
• China shipped a little fuel to Southeast Asia in April but curbs still bite
• China kept building its crude stockpile in April despite Iran crisis
• "Huge Shock": China Launches Crackdown On Cross-Border Stock Selling To Block Capital Outflows
• BOJ minions get core inflation data that's too low, look to energy shock to justify rate hike plans:
• Japan's core inflation hits 4-year low, rebound eyed on energy shock
• Eurozone minions admit Eurozone economy not heading to good place:
• EU in stagflationary trend, must not risk fiscal crisis, ministers say
• ECB minions thinking harder about ditching their perfectly positioned monetary policy to hike Eurozone interest rates:
• ECB will have to respond to inflation increase, EU's Dombrovskis says
• S&P 500 finishes week higher with nine sectors close in green
• Wall Street rises, Dow hits record high as Middle East hopes lift sentiment

The CME Group's FedWatch Tool moved up the expected timing of a quarter point increase in the Federal Funds Rate to 28 October (2026-Q4). The FedWatch tool also now anticipates another quarter point rate hike will come on 28 April (2027-Q2), with a strong probability its timing could also move earlier.

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow toolestimate of real GDP growth for the U.S. economy in the current quarter of 2026-Q2 increased to +4.3%, up from the +4.0% it projected a week earlier.

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull and bear who are at Indianapolis watching cars labeled 'Dow', 'SP 500', and 'NASDAQ' race around the track".

Which states are the most and least affordable places for American families to live after paying taxes and their essential expenses?

The Common Sense Institute tallied up the numbers and ranked each state after subtracting federal and state taxes and also essential expenses like housing, utilities, groceries, auto and health insurance, fuel, and childcare in each state from the paychecks for a family of four with two adult breadwinners who work full time and earn the state's median hourly income.

Visual Capitalist's Dorothy Neufield then revisualized the results to focus on how much that of the modeled families' income remained. Here's her version of the Common Sense Institute's map:

Here's her analysis of the most and least affordable states:

In top-ranked states like Iowa, households keep nearly 35% of their income, about $2,900 per month. In Hawaii, that figure drops to just 9%. That’s a difference of more than $2,000 per month in disposable income.

[...]

Midwestern states dominate the rankings, largely due to lower housing and childcare costs.

Iowa ranks first, with households keeping 34.7% of their income, followed by South Dakota (34.6%) and North Dakota (33.5%).

[...]

In the least affordable states, families spend up to 91% of their income on essentials and taxes, leaving little room for savings or unexpected expenses.

Hawaii families are most strained, with 9% of income left, followed by California at 10.9%. Between 2019 and 2025, California households saw one of the largest declines in affordability across states.

Massachusetts, despite high incomes, ranks near the bottom. Childcare alone consumes 24% of household income, showing how a single cost category can erode income advantages.

The Common Sense Instutute also looks at how each state's affordability has changed from 2019 to 2025. They find that Kansas, New Mexico, and Utah have seen their cost of living fall the most, while Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and California have seen the biggest escalation in living expenses over these years.

References

Dorothy Neufield. Mapped: Where Americans Keep Most of Their Paycheck. Visual Capitalist. [Online article]. 27 April 2026.

Once upon a time, in 2005, we wrote about Solare, architect Paolo Soler's ambitious concept of the Lean Linear City of the future, a city without cars and without urban sprawl. Robert Ipsen describes the basic concept of how a city might be successfully configured to achieve that result:

The first step is not design. The first step is choosing the spine.

The corridor comes before the city

The Lean Linear City is organized around an arterial spine. In the book, that spine is both technical and symbolic: high-speed rail, pedestrian circulation, utilities, energy distribution, civic access, and the shared metabolic infrastructure of the city are concentrated into a single linear system. The inhabited modules attach to it. Growth proceeds along it. The landscape outside it remains legible because the city has not spilled everywhere at once.

This is the crucial difference between a linear city and sprawl. Sprawl also grows outward, but it does so by multiplying roads, pipes, wires, parking lots, and private parcels in every direction. The lean linear form grows by intensifying a corridor. It accepts length while refusing dispersal. It says: if the city must extend, let it extend along a shared artery rather than dissolve into an asphalt mist.

It's the stuff of science fiction dreams. But in Saudi Arabia, it served as a foundation for a real-life megaproject: Neom. Here's a video introduction:

But it turned out to be a lot harder to execute than to draw up. The ambitious project has been severely scaled back. Matt Bevan of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News looks at what happened to the city of the future in the following 13-and-a-half minute video:

That report was in 2024. But is "The Line", as the Neom megaproject is known, really dead? The two percent of the project that wasn't defunded is still going forward. Here's The B1M's video report on the city's project from December 2025, which digs into the construction challenges of actually building the linear city:

As conceived, the linear city is a bold vision of what the city of the future could be. Given the challenges of making the project viable, it might always be.

In the United States, when people talk about mortgages, they almost invariably are talking about the 30-year fixed-rate conventional mortgage.

It wasn't always that way. In fact, it wasn't until the Housing Act of 1954 became law that the 30-year fixed rate mortgage became mainstream. The law's "combination of federal insurance and full amortization requirements made the extended timeline financially safe for banks". Soon after, the 30-year fixed rate conventional mortgage became the default for both lenders and home buyers.

But it wasn't until much later that federally-backed agencies like Freddie Mac began keeping regular track of what the average monthly interest rate was for homes bought in the U.S. with these mortgages. As important as they are for prospective American homeowners, the historical data for these mortgages only goes back to April 1971. Freddie Mac, officially known as Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, has maintained weekly data for mortgages extending back to that month. The government-sponsored enterprise also used to report monthly averages for mortgage rates from April 1971 forward, but discontinued the practice after December 2022.

And yet, because housing sales and prices are reported on a monthly basis, it's incredibly useful to have mortgage rates averaged over the period of a month. Since Freddie Mac isn't doing that job any more, we took it over and have made it publicly available.

It's built into the following interactive chart, which we've just updated to visualize 55 years worth of the average monthly interest rates for 30-year conventional mortgages in the U.S.

The average 30-year fixed-rate conventional mortgage was 6.33% in April 2026.

References

Freddie Mac. 30-Year Fixed Rate Mortgages Since 1971. [Online Database]. Accessed 15 May 2026. 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 month.

Image credit: Mortgage Payment Due date by alanharder.ca via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).

The outlook for the quarterly dividends of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) has substantially improved in the month since our previous snapshot?

Here is our summary of how the outlook for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed since our 15 April 2026 snapshot:

• 2026-Q2: Increase of $0.04 to $19.81 per share
• 2026-Q3: Increase of $0.46 to $20.94 per share
• 2026-Q4: Increase of $0.47 to $20.85 per share
• 2027-Q1: Increase of $0.40 to $22.14 per share
• 2027-Q2: Increase of $1.13 to $21.19 per share

The following chart shows how expectations for the S&P 500's quarterly dividends per share changed in the month from 15 April 2026 to 15 May 2026.

The large change in the forecast value for the most distant future quarter of 2027-Q2 is typical of the kind of volatility we see in dividend futures after the data for a new quarter first becomes available. Based on just the increases seen for all the other future quarters however, May 2026 saw one of the strongest month-over-month improvements in the S&P 500's dividend outlook in years.

Ready to find out more about dividend futures data? If this is your first exposure to the S&P 500's quarterly dividend futures, be sure to read the following section that explains what this data is communicating about the future for the index' dividends.

More About Dividend Futures Data

For this series, we take a snapshot of the CME Group's S&P 500 quarterly dividend futures data shortly after the second or third week of each month.

Dividend futures indicate the amount of dividends per share to be paid out over the period covered by each quarter's dividend futures contracts, which start on the day after the preceding quarter's dividend futures contracts expire and end on the third Friday of the month ending the indicated quarter. For example, as determined by dividend futures contracts, the now "current" quarter of 2026-Q2 began on Saturday, 21 March 2026 and will end on Friday, 19 June 2026. Since the expectations for this quarter's dividend payouts can change all the way up to that final date, it qualifies as a future quarter.

Because dividend futures are tied to options contracts that run on this schedule, that makes these figures different from the quarterly dividends per share figures that are reported by Standard and Poor. S&P reports the amount of dividends per share paid out during regular calendar quarters after the end of each quarter. This term mismatch accounts for the differences in dividends reported by both sources, with the biggest differences between the two typically seen in the first and fourth quarters of each year.

Dividend futures data is important for more than just what they project will be a future quarter's dividend payout. They represent the quantified expectations investors have for the future income they will realize from holding their investments, which in turn, affects how investors set current day stock prices. How changes in the outlook for dividends at specific points of time in the future contribute to changes in current day stock prices is described by this math.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "A crystal ball with the word 'SP 500' written inside it". And 'Dividends' written above it, which we added.