By PATRICK LAVERY
Incremental but persistent increases in the Federal Open Market Committee’s policy interest rate have now officially entered a second year, with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announcing another quarter-percentage point hike on Wednesday.
The target rate is now 5.25%, up five full points since April 2022. Powell reiterated in his prepared remarks that the Fed’s objective is returning inflation to 2%, its historic target.
Unfortunately, Powell acknowledged, interest rates remain stubbornly high. Powell said that for the 12 months ending with this past March, total Personal Consumption Expenditures prices rose 4.2%, excluding food and energy prices which tend to be more volatile, while core PCE prices were up 4.6%.
“Inflation has moderated somewhat since the middle of…
By PATRICK LAVERY
A new book providing insider insight into how millions of Americans were provided mortgage and rental assistance in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been released.
“Shelter from the Storm: How a COVID Mortgage Meltdown Was Averted” is by Cato Institute Senior Advisor Mark Calabria who was, at the outset of the pandemic, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, overseeing Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Federal Home Loan Banks.
Calabria’s new policy memoir, promoted as “a story about how you can directly help Main Street without bailing out Wall Street,” not only takes a look at the issues that surfaced in 2020 and beyond but also how the mistakes of the 2008 financial crisis –…
By PATRICK LAVERY
“Let’s go to the mall!” wasn’t just a catchphrase popularized by alter-ego Robin Sparkles on the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.” In the 1980s and 1990s, shoppers flocked to malls to satisfy their needs for a variety of goods, and adolescents went there just to hang out, patronize the food court, and be social.
But sometime in the two decades between the turn of the millennium and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the megamall as an American institution gave way to the likes of Walmart, eBay, and Amazon. It’s gotten to the point where thumbing through slideshows of abandoned malls has become almost as perverse a pleasure as seeing what’s happened to former Olympic venues.…
By PATRICK LAVERY
The result of this week’s two-day Federal Open Market Committee meeting was not nothing, but neither was it as aggressive a decision as officials at the Federal Reserve might have liked to make.
Once again, the target range for the federal funds rate was raised one-quarter of a percentage point, bringing them up to 4.75% to 5%.
What kind of news that turns out to be for the housing market remains to be seen, but it doesn’t stray too much from what several industry experts told The Mortgage Note last week.
In fact, the 25-basis point hike was exactly what was predicted in TMN’s interview with Nadia Evangelou, senior economist and director of real estate research for…
By PATRICK LAVERY
Speculation about what actions leaders at the Federal Reserve will take at their meeting starting Tuesday has been building for weeks, and opinions over the right course of action are varied.
Should they stay the course, steadily raising interest rates to try to continue to curb inflation? Should they be more aggressive? Or should they pull back, letting the United States slide into a recession?
These questions have been swirling for months but the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and New York-based Signature Bank changed the dynamics of the conversations seemingly overnight.
Nadia Evangelou, senior economist and director of real estate research for the National Association of Realtors, said prior to the bank collapses, she could…
By PATRICK LAVERY
Interest rates are rising as the spring homebuying season starts in many parts of the country.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell indicated in his testimony before U.S. lawmakers this week that although the central bank’s policymakers have yet to decide how large their next rate hike will be, “the ultimate level of interest rates is likely to be higher than previously anticipated” based on the latest economic data. They will be meeting on March 21 and 22.
“As I have mentioned in my testimony, the data we have seen so far this year suggests that the ultimate level of rates will need to be higher. We still have some more data to come in between now and…
By PATRICK LAVERY
As the retail giant Walmart makes news with their plans to close underperforming locations, urban designers see an opportunity to discuss repurposing retail properties.
A recent Nexstar Media wire report confirmed that despite a strong holiday shopping season to end 2022, Walmart was preparing to close seven stores in three states – including three in Illinois, all in the Chicagoland vicinity.
The big box giant referred to these locations, also in Arkansas, Florida, New Mexico, and Wisconsin, as “underperforming.” One of them, in Lincolnwood, Ill., was a pickup and delivery-only store that opened in 2019.
While that kind of model made sense during the retail restrictions of the Covid pandemic, it seems to be one that Walmart…
By PATRICK LAVERY
In a Hunterdon County, New Jersey, strip mall long characterized by higher-end retailers like Ulta Beauty and Talbots, one trio of newer storefronts may seem incongruous.
Start at Axeiom, a women and LGBTQ+-focused axe throwing space, then walk a few steps to Aunt Mary’s, a cannabis dispensary opening first for medical cardholders and eventually for adult-use, and then buy a burrito at Pancheros Mexican Grill.
Sounds like an amusing night, right?
But this potential scenario may hinge on the future of an industry that has caught the imagination of those who rent retail space and investors interested in making a buck from marijuana.
A 3% dropoff compared to the rest of 2022 in Q4 rents collected by…
By PATRICK LAVERY You’ve seen them. They masquerade as churches, funeral homes, radio stations, pharmacies, even – blasphemy! – other restaurants. But they all have one thing in common. They used to be a Pizza Hut. Now, it may be true that no one out-pizzas the Hut, but the huts themselves have slowly become outmoded relics over the past two to three decades when it comes to the chain’s business model. In that time, the take-out option that was always an alternative to sitting under the red, trapezoidal roof has brought Pizza Hut closer in spirit to its main competitors Domino’s, Little Caesars, and Papa John’s. It’s now common to see Pizza Hut paired in strip malls, airports, or rest…
