Colossal Biosciences is a biotechnology company that's taken on the challenge of reviving extinct species as a core part of its mission. Earlier this year, they announced success at breeding chickens using their artificial egg technology, which they see as key to "de-extincting" large avian species like New Zealand's moa.
They publicized the achievement in a video that gives strong Jurassic Park vibes:
When they make the next Jurassic Park/World sequel, we hope they work the line "hexagons are the bestagons" into the script.
As for Colossal Biosciences, it's a real company that's reportedly worth around $10 billion that's seeking to raise money to further the technologies they're developing.
Labels: technology
The U.S. new home market continued stumbling along in May 2026.
Political Calculations' initial estimate of the total value of new home sales in the United States during May 2026 is $28.62 billion. This value is slightly higher than the initial estimate of $28.30 billion for April 2026, which has been revised downward to $28.18 billion for this month.
This estimate rose largely because average new home sale prices have been rising, which have offset a falling number of sales in recent months as mortgage rates in the United States increased to near their highest levels in the past year:
The contract rate on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage — the most common U.S. home loan — climbed 7 basis points to 6.76% in the week ended July 24, just shy of a one-year high, the Mortgage Bankers Association said on Wednesday. The rate on 15-year, fixed-rate loans climbed 11 basis points to 6.15%, the highest in just over a year.
Meanwhile, rates on adjustable-rate mortgages, which can be a more affordable option in the face of high fixed-rate costs but come with the risk of a higher rate reset later on, also moved higher. The rate on a 5-year ARM edged up to 5.98% last week.
Looking at the big picture for the U.S. new home market, the following charts present the U.S. new home market capitalization, the number of new home sales, and their average sale prices as measured by their time-shifted, trailing twelve month averages from January 1976 through May 2026.
New home sales trending downward:
Rising trend for new home prices:
We'll take a closer look at the impact these factors are having on the relative affordability of new homes being sold in the U.S. in the next week.
References
U.S. Census Bureau. New Residential Sales Historical Data. Houses Sold. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 24 July 2026.
U.S. Census Bureau. New Residential Sales Historical Data. Median and Average Sale Price of Houses Sold. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 24 July 2026.
Image Credit: Construction worker in hard hat on a building frame photo by Josh Olalde on Unsplash.
Labels: real estate
There are thirty stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Index: DJI), the U.S. stock market's oldest running index. Unlike the S&P 500 (Index: SPX), the market capitalization-weighted index that's overtaken it as standard for measuring the performance of the U.S. stock market, the component stocks of the DJI are weighted according to their price.
For example, the stock of Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) has the heaviest weight within the index, accounting for 11.72% of its value on 27 July 2026 thanks to its highest-in-the-index share price of $1,041.82.
With a share price of $837.24, Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT) ranks second, making up 9.42% of the index. The third largest component stock of the DJI belongs to United Health (NYSE: UNH), whose share price of $427.54 gives it a 4.8% share of the entire Dow Jones Industrial Average.
The following chart visualizes the relative share of each of the DJI's 30 component stocks within the index:
We wondered how this chart would change if the thirty Dow Jones Industrial component stocks were weighted within the index according to their market capitalization. The next chart shows the results of that exercise, keeping the order and coloring of the component stock shares the same as the price-weighted visualization:
The DJI's top three components of Goldman Sachs, Caterpillar, and United Health go from accounting for a combined 25.94% of the index to just 4.23%. In their place, the top three component stocks of become Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), which would account for 49.7% of the entire DJI's valuation.
References
Slickcharts. Dow Jones Industrial Average: Price Weighting of Component Stocks and Market Capitalization. 27 July 2026.
Labels: data visualization, market cap, stock market
July 2026 saw positive changes overall for the Thanksgiving Leftover portfolio made up of the ten worst-performing stocks in the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) as of Thanksgiving 2025. At least, as compared to how they fared in June 2025.
The equal-weighted weighted version of the portfolio overtook the market cap-weighted version over the past month. Through the close of trading on 27 July 2026, the equal-weighted group of Thanksgiving Leftover stocks rise to 88.5% of their value recorded on 28 November 2025. That compares with the 87.4% valuation of the market-cap weighted version of the ten stock portfolio.
That's a change from most of the preceding seven months that had the market-cap weighted version of the 2025 Thanksgiving Leftover stock portfolio outperforming the equal-weighted version. It's also developed as the S&P 500 index itself has largely moved sideways, rising from 107.4% to 108.2% of its post-2025 Thanksgiving holiday valuation.
The following chart shows the performance of all three sets of stocks, with the two Thanksgiving Leftover stock indices continuing to lag behind the S&P 500 index by a wide margin.
Much of the gain of the equal-weighted version of the Thanksgiving Leftover stock index has come about because the three worst performing individual stocks in the portfolio, Lululemon Athletica (NASDAQ: LULU), Gartner (NYSE: IT), and The Trade Desk (NASDAQ: TTD) stopped falling and even rebounded a bit in the past month.
More significantly for the equal-weighted Leftover stocks, Factset Research Systems (NYSE: FDS) rose 23% over its level a month earlier.
At the same time, three stocks that account for 45% of the makeup of the market-cap version of the Thanksgiving Leftover stock portfolio, Chipotle Mexican Grill (NYSE: CMG), Fiserv (NASDAQ: FISV), and Alexandria Real Estate Equities (NYSE: ARE), saw positive but smaller gains over the preceding month while the Leftover stocks' highest flyers, Molina Healthcare (NYSE: MOH), Deckers Outdoor (NYSE: DECK), and Dow Inc. (NYSE: DOW) were little changed from where they were a month earlier, though they changed quite a bit in between!
The spaghetti chart tracks the relative movements of 2025's ten Thanksgiving Leftover stocks with respect to their value on the day after 2025's Thanksgiving holiday.
Will the equal-weighted continue pulling ahead of the market-cap weighted version of the Thanksgiving Leftover portfolio? Or will the market-cap weighting win out? We'll next see where things stand near the end of August 2026.
Labels: ideas, stock prices
The S&P 500 (Index: SPX) fell a little under 0.7% during the trading week ending on Friday, 24 July 2026. The index ended the week at 7,408.70, which is 201.08 points (or 2.6%) below its all time record high of 7,609.78 from 2 June 2026.
The past week didn't see a single catalyst to weigh on stock prices, but rather three of them. Oil prices briefly shot up over $100 per barrel with the Iran war's disruption to oil shipping in the Middle East. The risk of higher inflation prompted the second catalyst of the specter of higher interest rates to rear its ugly head.
But the third catalyst was perhaps the most significant. Outsized capital expenditures by AI tech giants like Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL and GOOG) and speculated for firms like Meta Platforms sent their stock prices sharply lower from where they closed the previous week. That action pulled the S&P 500 lower overall thanks to their outsized shares of the total valuation of all the stocks within the market cap-weighted index.
Overall, the S&P 500's trajectory ticked down to toward the lower end of the redzone forecast range on the latest update of the alternative futures chart.
As we're reaching the end of the redzone forecast range, we find the level of the index is consistent with investors fixing their attention on either the current quarter of 2026-Q3 or the more distant future quarter of 2026-Q4. Investors have reason to focus on each of these quarters thanks to their status as quarters in which the Federal Reserve will most likely hike short term interest rates in the U.S. The CME Group's FedWatch Tool now projects two quarter point rate hikes in the months ahead. The first would occur after the Fed meets on 16 September (2026-Q3) and the second would take place on 9 December (2026-Q4). The FedWatch tool's projections are biased toward potential additional rate hikes in 2027 with the most likely timing in the first half of the year.
If, when, and by how much the Fed might change interest rates however will be affected by the random onset of new information. Here are the market moving headlines from the trading week ending on Friday, 24 July 2026:
- Monday, 20 July 2026
-
- Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
- US to hit Canada with 50% tariffs on wide range of goods
- New York issues moratorium on data centers
- Oil reverses as Iranian comments interpreted as chance for fresh negotiations
- Bigger bailout developing in China:
- ECB minions relieved to see oil price surge isn't causing Eurozone wage growth, but still getting excited to hike interest rates:
- ECB survey sees moderating wage demands, selling price growth
- Markets price in two ECB rate hikes by early 2027 on inflation concerns
- Wall Street ends lower as oil prices rise, investors await big tech earnings
- Tuesday, 21 July 2026
-
- Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
- Trump prepares fresh tariff barrage with 10% levies set to expire
- Oil prices rise to five-week high on US-Iran attacks, Houthi blockade threat
- Economists think Fed minions won't hike U.S. interest rates in 2026, but think there's a chance they will:
- Bigger trouble developing in China:
- China considers tighter export controls on AI models and chips, FT reports
- China's world-leading renewable megabases rely on coal-heavy transmission, report finds
- China's steel sector looks weaker than it is, reverse for iron ore
- ECB minions clamp down on Eurozone credit:
- Dow gains nearly 400 points; S&P 500 snaps 3-day losing run as chip stocks rise
- Wednesday, 22 July 2026
-
- Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
- OpenAI models went rogue during testing
- US 30-year mortgage hits 11-month high, MBA says
- Oil climbs over 3% to near six-week high as conflict threatens key oil transit routes
- BOJ minions fear yen's decline will continue, standing by to hike interest rates to prop up Japan's currency:
- BOJ on alert to price risks that may lead to faster rate hikes, sources say
- Yen steadies near 40-year low on rate-hike bets, intervention talks
- ECB minions standing by to hike Eurozone interest rates later:
- Wall Street ends red as U.S. stocks struggle ahead of Tesla, Alphabet results
- Thursday, 23 July 2026
-
- Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
- How the hunt for value sparked a US private-label revolution
- AI will not trigger employment collapse, staffing company Adecco Group says
- Oil prices rise for a fifth day as US-Iran hostilities threaten supply routes
- Fed minions keeping mum, including the hawkish ones who want to hike interest rates:
- BOJ minions / Bigger trouble developing in Japan:
- ECB minions worrying about rising oil prices again, but strangely choose to leave Eurozone interest rates unchanged if they really believe inflationary shock is coming:
- Oil price surge reignites inflation worries ahead of ECB meeting
- ECB Keeps Rates Unchanged (As Expected), Warns 'Full Energy Inflationary Shock Yet To Come'
- ECB minions also thinking about other things:
- ECB considering several options to mitigate losses, sources say
- ECB will discuss raising banks' minimum reserves, Lagarde says
- U.S. stocks end lower as oil reaches $100/bbl; investors assess tech results
- Friday, 24 July 2026
-
- Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
- Trump imposes forced labor tariffs, drawing protests from trading partners
- Oil retreats from above $100, still set for weekly rise on Middle East escalation
- US business activity perks up in July, helped by World Cup, but trend may not last, S&P Global says
- Fed minions being told by markets how to set interest rates:
- BOJ minions live up to expectations as bigger trouble develops in Japan:
- BOJ likely to keep inflation warning but expect no big build-up in risks
- Yen heads for biggest weekly drop since May despite Tokyo's support pledges
- ECB minions get data indicating no changes in Eurozone inflation outlook:
- S&P 500 posts weekly loss while defensive sectors outperform
The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tool's estimate of real GDP growth for the U.S. economy in the current quarter of 2026-Q2 was unchanged at +1.7%, with no updates in the past week.
Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bear scaring a bull with a stage presentation on 'WHY BULLS SHOULD BE SCARED' with three easels set up that say 'OIL PRICES', 'RATE HIKES' and 'AI CAPEX COSTS'". The tag indicating the image was "AI generated" is something new, but hopefully no surprise to any of our readers who read all our articles down to this bottom line!
Keeping your digital accounts secure is a never ending arms race.
Computing technology increases in capability every year. For hackers with access to the latest, greatest computers and code, it is easier than ever for them to run through tens of millions of combinations of characters to discover your passwords.
What you thought might be a safe and secure password a few years ago may now be vulnerable to being cracked. And if your password can be easily cracked, how safe are your accounts?
Hive Systems has updated their "Time It Takes a Hacker to Brute Force Your Password" infographic for 2026. Here is the table showing how long a competent hacker would take to find passwords made up of various lengths and combinations of characters:
How easy it is for a hacker to crack your password depends upon how long it is and what combinations of numbers, lower case letters, upper case letters, and special characters you use in your password. As you can see in the chart, in 2026, if you're using eight digit numbers as your password, you might as well not even bother having one....
Labels: data visualization, technology
Is it time to send the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey off to the not-so-useful data junk heap?
The answer to this question hinges on whether the survey is really useful or not. Useful data will quantify information that tells us something useful about what it purports to measure. In the case of the University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment Survey, it should provide accurate information about how a sampling of American consumers surveyed by University of Michigan academics view the state of the U.S. economy at the time it was taken.
For the surveyed results to qualify as useful information, which is to say information that policy makers can use to make sound decisions in setting policies, the surveyed sample must be representative of the U.S. population as a whole. Because if the sampling doesn't meet that statistical requirement, any policy set according to the survey's results would at a high risk of failure because it would directly lead to false conclusions. It's the policy wonk version of the "Garbage In, Garbage Out" problem from computer programming.
From the outside looking in, we should be able to tell whether a survey provides useful information from information about the population sample used to compile its findings. If the characteristics of the sampling reliably matches the characteristics of the U.S. population, then the survey is probably giving a good reading on how consumers see the U.S. economy. But if it deviates too far from the characteristics of the general population, then the odds that the survey is outputting results that belong in the garbage go way up.
Sampling appears to be a big problem with the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey. Nate Silver recengly honed in on the Michigan academics' survey samples in recent years to explain why their work product has become less than useful data:
For nearly four years, the internet has debated whether we’ve been mired in what Kyla Scanlon dubbed a “vibecession” — whether people feel worse about the economy than the underlying data suggests they “should” feel. People as esteemed as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman have frequently posted about the vibes mystery. Nate wrote a whole piece about the divergence in the New York Times two years ago.
But there’s one big problem with the discussion: most of the participants are relying on a broken survey, the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey (“Index of Consumer Sentiment” or “ICS”), that is in dire need of being repaired. Failure to correct for these issues has led to plenty of pet theories — but they explain a trend that may not even exist.
It wasn't always that way. Silver notes the degradation of the quality of the Unviersity of Michigan survey is a recent development:
The University of Michigan ICS is the gold standard sentiment survey measuring consumer sentiment. The survey has historically shown a very strong correlation with “hard” economic data such as inflation and unemployment. But before more bad analysis gets done on the vibecession, people need to know they’re working with dubious data. As with election polls, the ICS has struggled amid a shift away from telephone polling. There are issues both with partisan nonresponse, with some political groups more likely to respond than others, and partisan expressive response, with survey-takers using questions about the economy to express political sentiment.
So the problems with the ICS are these:
- The switch to online polling made responses more negative and,
- There are too many Democrats in the sample.
Thus, ICS data since mid-2024 is not comparable to past periods.
Silver goes into far more detail in his analysis, we do recommend reading the whole thing. Here's his conclusion:
The conclusion is simple: the ICS cannot continue to ignore its sample’s skewed partisanship in the future. And people who write about consumer and voter sentiment shouldn’t ignore the problems either. President Trump is highly unpopular, and, in contrast to his first term, his economic numbers are worse than his overall ratings. But the Michigan survey exaggerates just how sour consumers are feeling about the economy – the vibecession is partly an artifact of bad data.
The changes in the University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment Survey methodology and the excessively politicized slant of its recently targeted samples of the U.S. population have impaired the reliability of the survey. In effect, the survey's previous "gold standard" status has been debased. The Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey has become less than useful data. Worse, there is no evidence as yet the academics who manage it are attempting any course correction to make its data useful for drawing valid conclusions.
Previously on Political Calculations
Here are all the articles in the "Less Than Useful Data" series!
- Less Than Useful Data in the World of Big Data
- Less Than Useful Data: Consumer Confidence?
- Less Than Useful Data: FHFA House Price Index
- Less Than Useful Data: Index of Leading Economic Indicators
- Less Than Useful Data: Weekly Chain Store Sales
- Less Than Useful Data: Challenger Layoff Announcements
- Less Than Useful Data: ADP Employment Index
- Less Than Useful Data: Inflation Indices
- Less Than Useful Data: The Real-World Costs of Bad Data
- Less Than Useful Data: Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey
Image credit: Reliability and Validity by Nevit Dilmen on Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Deed.
Labels: ideas
The Global Carbon Budget offers a wealth of data on carbon dioxide emissions. That includes estimates of how CO₂ each nation has emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in each year since 1850. The latest edition of the report covers emissions from that year through 2024.
But that's not the whole story for atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. When carbon dioxide is emitted into the air, it enters into the planet's carbon cycle, which extracts a portion of the emitted carbon dioxide from the air. These natural processes then play out slowly over decades, centuries, and millennia.
It's possible to estimate how much of a given year's emissions still remain in the Earth's air.
The following chart reveals both the total historic emissions of carbon dioxide and the portion of those emissions that is still present in the air from the modern day territories of the United Kingdom, India, the European Union, China, the United States, and the combined rest of the world for emissions produced in the years from 1850 through 2024.
Here are the percentages to indicate the portion of each territory's total historic emissions from 1850 through 2024 that remain in the Earth's atmosphere:
- United Kingdom: 49.3%
- India: 78.6%
- European Union: 55.7%
- China: 78.5%
- United States: 57.8%
- Rest of the World: 66.4%
The following treemap chart visualizes each territory's share of the amount of excess carbon dioxide (defined as that coming from fossil fuel combustion in the years from 1850 through 2024) that is still in the air today:
In the three years from 2021 to 2024, China's share has risen from 17.3% to 18.5%, while the United States' share has declined from 22.3% to 21.4%. With those opposing trends, we project China's emissions that remain in the air will surpass those of the United States in 2031, the timing of which is unchanged from what we projected three years ago.
References
Friedlingstein et al. Global Carbon Budget 2025, Earth System Science Data, 13 May 2026. DOI: 10.5194/essd-18-3211-2026.
Political Calculations. How Long Does Carbon Dioxide Stay in the Atmosphere? [Online Article, Tool]. 19 July 2023.
Political Calculations. How Much Fossil Fuel CO2 Is in the Air? [Online Article]. 15 August 2023.
Political Calculations. Who Made the Excess Carbon Dioxide in Today's Air?. [Online Article]. 29 September 2023.
Image credit: Carbon Cycle by NASA on Wikimedia Commons Public Domain CC0 1.0 Universal Deed.
Labels: data visualization, environment
The rate at which carbon dioxide emissions accumulate in the Earth's air fell in June 2026. This measure of human economic activity is now at levels last seen near the bottom of the coronavirus pandemic.
Because China is the world's leading producer of carbon dioxide emissions by a wide margin, the changing concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere is really telling us quite a bit about the relative health of China's economy. The falling pace of CO₂ accumulation communicates that China's productive economy is operating well below its potential.
That conclusion is supported by media reports that indicate China is experiencing its lowest economic growth since 2022. The slowing of China's economy has been visible in the trailing year average of the year-over-year change in atmospheric CO₂ concentration levels since they last peaked in January 2025.
The following chart shows how this measure has changed from January 2000 through June 2026, which allows us to compare the current decline with those recorded during the COVID era and other global economic downturns:
Getting back to the scale of China's carbon dioxide emissions, in 2024, China produced 31.8% of the world's total CO₂ emissions. By comparison, the United States produced 12.7% to rank second among nations.
References
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth System Research Laboratory. Mauna Loa Observatory CO2 Data. [Online Data]. Updated 5 July 2026.
Image Credit: Smokestack emissions from a factory in Harbin, China photo by Ziang Guo on Unsplash.
Labels: environment
The S&P 500 (Index: SPX) retreated 1.5% from its previous week's close to end the week at 7,457.69.
Much of the market's downward movement came in response to a growing awareness among investors of the high cost of utilizing the most advanced AI systems over the last several weeks. The shift in sentiment has largely capped the upward movement of these stocks despite many having just reported strong earnings.
But it hasn't deflated the S&P 500 the way the index crashed during 2025's "DeepSeek" scare, which one analyst provocatively described as "hiding" a crashing market brought about by investors rotating their investments from AI tech stocks into other sectors of the market.
That's a phenomenon we've described as the conveyance effect. This is a special case of market rotation, in which the gains of what might be described as a speculative bubble within either a single stock or sector of the stock market becomes diffused into the larger market.
Provided investors maintain their demand to own stocks, it can be a healthy development that reduces the concentration of the biggest companies within the market cap-weighted index. In that situation, the index itself goes through a brief decline before resuming an upward trajectory.
If that demand falls however, the index can decline because money is in effect leaving the market instead of being conveyed into the ownership of other stocks within it. That's the recipe for a crash that takes both the sector with the speculative gain and the rest of the market down with it. Much like what happened during the DeepSeek scare.
In the latest update of the alternative futures chart, we find the S&P 500's trajectory dipped, but remains well within the redzone forecast range. This outcome indicates the deflation of speculative gains in the AI sector hasn't become a drag on the whole stock market.
There is, of course, more going on to shape investors' outlook for the businesses whose stocks make up S&P 500 index. Here are the market moving headlines of the week that was:
- Monday, 13 July 2026
-
- Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
- Oil up 9% to one-month high as US says it will blockade entire Iranian coastline, all vessels
- This one statistic reveals the AI job takeover has started
- Fed minion makes rate hike nearly a 50-50 possibility for July 2026:
- Bigger trouble, stimulus developing in China:
- China's GDP growth set to slow, raising expectations for more stimulus
- China June exports growth set to cool, but AI demand underpins overall strength - Reuters poll
- China's premier urges 'objective' understanding of the economy
- China aims to spur consumption in first five-year blueprint
- BOJ minions think higher growth on the way for Japan's economy as stimulus expected:
- BOJ may raise growth forecast, maintain vigilance to inflation risk, sources say
- Japan signals massive pension shift to domestic assets, sparking rally in yen, bonds
- ECB minions thinking about adding Eurocrypto as Eurozone currency:
- U.S. stocks end lower as chip stocks fall, U.S.-Iran tensions rise
- Tuesday, 14 July 2026
-
- Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
- Inflation eased more than expected in June as gas prices fell, CPI report shows
- US consumer inflation likely increased at a slow pace in June as gasoline prices retreated
- Here’s the inflation breakdown for June 2026 — in one chart
- Rate-Hike Odds Slump As US Consumer Prices Plunge Most Since COVID In June
- Traders expect Fed to skip July rate hike as inflation cools
- Oil prices rise 2% to one-month high as US-Iran attacks deepen supply disruption
- New chief Fed minion lays out U.S. monetary policy changes to Congress:
- Fed's Warsh: Committed to both inflation and employment mandates
- Warsh pledges Fed policy ‘regime change’ to rid inflation ‘tax’ on American people
- Warsh says markets to get ample notice to any Fed balance sheet changes
- Growth in China's exports paced by AI demand outside China, weak demand for loans within China:
- China's June trade tops forecasts buoyed by AI boom
- China tells some banks not to re-discount bills at rates below 0.5%, sources say
- S&P 500 and Nasdaq end higher on cool inflation data, solid bank earnings
- Wednesday, 15 July 2026
-
- Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
- US producer prices post largest drop in 14 months; inflation risks still tilted to the upside
- Busiest US container port sets cargo record in June
- Oil prices make small gain on smaller US inventory draw
- Wall Street bank earnings surge, lifted by trading and investment banking
- Fed minion reveals they're not really paying attention to U.S. inflation data:
- Another minion sees the writing on the wall:
- Fed minions thinking about revamping their own inflation measure:
- Bigger trouble developing in China:
- China's second-quarter economic growth cools to 3-1/2-year low as imbalances worsen
- VIEW China's second-quarter economic growth misses market forecast
- China new home prices fall at slower pace, but recovery doubtful
- China's rare earth curbs endanger $6.5 trillion of Western industry, IEA says
- BOJ minions / Bigger trouble developing in Japan:
- ECB minions standing by for action:
- Wall Street closes higher as the tech trade strengthens, wholesale inflation comes cooler
- Thursday, 16 July 2026
-
- Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
- US pending home sales slump in June amid affordability challenges
- Lower gasoline prices restrain US retail sales, underlying momentum remains
- Fed minions called out for policy flip-flops:
- As Fed Chair Warsh sticks to policy silence, colleagues voice their views
- Fed flip-flops make case for less talk
- Fed minions say they'll hike rates if inflation doesn't fall, don't seem to be aware of consumer, producer price indices:
- Fed may need to hike rates if inflation does not ease soon, Jefferson says
- Fed's Schmid: Inflation is "concerning" and the focus of setting policy right now
- Fed's Logan calls for 'modestly higher' interest rates
- Bigger trouble, stimulus developing in China:
- Bigger trouble developing in Japan, BOJ minions getting excited to hike Japan's interest rates again, bail out Japan's currency again:
- Kuroda's negative rate surprise shocked his own BOJ board, minutes show
- Japan household inflation expectations rise, build case for BOJ rate hikes
- BOJ may face pressure to ramp up bond-buying if yields spike, ex-central bank policymaker says
- ECB minions standing by to hike Eurozone interest rates later:
- ECB to hold rates now but energy price resurgence points to September hike
- Euro zone yields rise, gap between German and US borrowing costs smallest in a month
- Wall Street closes in the red as tech stocks drag markets
- Friday, 17 July 2026
-
- Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
- As US AI costs soar, global businesses pivot to China’s low-cost, open-weight models
- Oil rises on renewed US-Iran hostilities and threat of Red Sea closure
- US regional banks brush off war jitters with lending surge, fee boost
- Bigger trouble developing in and out of China:
- China's oil imports have plunged during the Iran war. How much will they recover?
- China's top airlines warn of heavy losses ahead of uncertain summer
- Inside the Chinese fraud rings stealing billio
- Chinese AI start-up Moonshot launches model challenging Anthropic’s lead
- Bigger trouble developing in Japan, BOJ minions standing by for action:
- Japan June core inflation seen at 1.6% on elevated energy prices: Reuters poll
- Yen likely to weaken past 170 before Japan's growth bet pays off, RSM's Brusuelas says
- Japan to leave monetary policy tools to BOJ in economic blueprint, document shows
- S&P 500 logs weekly decline as tech selloff weighs on markets
The CME Group's FedWatch Tool now only sees one rate hike in its forecast range as having a greater than 50% probability of happening: a quarter point rate hike coming when the Fed meets on 16 September (2026-Q3). The FedWatch tool however still sees the potential for additional rate hikes in 2027.
The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tool's estimate of real GDP growth for the U.S. economy in the current quarter of 2026-Q2 rebounded to +1.7% from the previous week's real growth estimate of +1.2%.
Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull who is shocked by the cost of their AI bill".
Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:
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