After showing remarkable strength and resilience since the pandemic, the job market has started to cool off significantly. The unemployment rate has risen to 4.1% from 3.6% in June 2023, and the number of job openings continues to trend downward.
In September, the delinquency rate of office loans converted into securities increased to 8.36%, the highest rate since November 2013.
KKR and Energy Capital Partners have agreed to invest a combined $50 billion in data-center and power-generation projects to support the development of artificial intelligence.
The vacancy rate is stabilizing at a near record level of 13.8%, up from 9.4% in the fourth quarter in 2019. Since the second quarter of 2020, U.S. office tenants have vacated close to 209 million square feet of space, the highest amount ever for a four-and-half-year period.
Roughly a third of people who financed their vehicles have negative equity on their auto loans which means their loan is larger than the value of their car. That share would amount to some 31 million of the more than 100 million auto-loan accounts.
U.S. Consumer confidence is declining as the election nears. The survey showed a continuing frustration with high prices.
Goldman Sachs this month sold $475 million of public asset-backed securitization, or ABS, bonds backed by loans the bank makes to fund managers that tide them over until cash from investors comes in. The first-of-its-kind deal is a lucrative byproduct of the New York bank’s push into loans to investment firms, such as these so-called capital-call lines.
A lengthy stretch of scant new construction of retail real estate, combined with demand from expanding retailers, has reduced a longstanding property glut. Retail availability sits near record lows.
Median new-home prices were down on a monthly basis for much of the past year. The most recent decline of nearly 5% in August brought them to roughly $420,000. Prices for previously owned homes, meanwhile, have hit record highs.
