The spread between current coupon benchmark mortgage bonds and the yield of relevant Treasurys is currently between 1.3 to 1.4 percentage points. That gap has been unusually wide for a few years now, well above the sub-1 point gap seen back in 2019.

More than 1.6 million of those jobless workers had been job hunting for at least six months. The number of people searching for that long is up more than 50% since the end of 2022.

Spreads on 10-year, investment-grade corporate bonds, which make up the core of the market, stood at 86 basis points as of Thursday, down from 116 basis points a year earlier. Before this year, investment-grade spreads hadn’t been that low since 2005.

Total assets in U.S.-based ETFs reached a record $10.6 trillion at the end of November, an increase of more than 30% from the start of 2024.

Nearly a quarter of total U.S. household debt was held by people 60 and older as of the third quarter, about double the percentage at the start of this century.

Nationwide, taxes and insurance make up more than half of the monthly mortgage payment for 9% of single-family mortgages. That is up from less than 4% at the end of 2014.

Blackstone has marked its most active year in Japan, with about $7.7 billion in transactions across its real estate and private equity business in the country.

Labor markets remain in a delicate equilibrium. Hiring rates are low, but so are layoffs. The economy has added more than 140,000 jobs on average over the six months through November. But the unemployment rate has drifted up to 4.2%, from 3.7% at the beginning of the year.

Prices for groceries were up 1.6% from a year earlier in November. But they were up 27% from February 2020.

The small-business optimism index jumped in November to its highest reading since June 2021 and the index measuring company plans for capital investment, hiring and sales, rose to the highest level in more than two years in the fourth quarter.