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Note: Mortgage rates are from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are for top tier scenarios. For deaths, I'm currently using 4 weeks ago for "now", since the most recent three weeks will be revised significantly. Note: "Effective May 1, 2024, hospitals are no longer required to report COVID-19 hospital admissions, hospital capacity, or hospital occupancy data."  So, I'm no longer tracking hospitalizations. COVID Metrics  NowWeek AgoGoal Deaths per Week673765≤3501 1my goals to stop weekly posts. 🚩 Increasing number weekly for Deaths. ✅ Goal met. Click on graph for larger image. This graph shows the weekly (columns) number of deaths reported since Jan 2023. Although weekly deaths met the original goal to stop posting in June 2023 (low of 314 deaths), I've continued to post since deaths are above the goal again - and I'll continue to post until weekly deaths are once again below the goal. Weekly deaths are now decreasing following the winter pickup and only double the low last...
5 hours ago

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More from Calculated Risk

Q1 GDP Tracking: Wide Range

From BofA: Our 1Q GDP tracking remains unchanged at 1.9% q/q saar and our 4Q GDP tracking is down two tenths to 2.3% q/q saar since our last weekly publication. [Mar 14th] emphasis added From Goldman: We lowered our Q1 GDP tracking estimate by 0.3pp to +1.3% last week. [Mar 10th estimate] Atlanta Fed Economist Patrick Higgins put out a special note For GDP Forecasters, Some Gold Doesn't Glitter We generally take a hands-off approach in updating and distributing our GDPNow model forecasts. With one exception, once a forecast quarter begins, the code of the model does not change. Any tweaks to the model are made at the beginning of the subsequent quarter. The next update for GDPNow will be on March 17th. Currently the gold adjusted GDP tracking is 0.4% for Q1.

12 hours ago 2 votes
Q4 Update: Delinquencies, Foreclosures and REO

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Q4 Update: Delinquencies, Foreclosures and REO A brief excerpt: This entire housing cycle I’ve argued that we would NOT see a surge in foreclosures that would significantly impact house prices (as happened following the housing bubble) for two key reasons: 1) mortgage lending has been solid, and 2) most homeowners have substantial equity in their homes. This graph shows the nominal dollar value of Residential REO for FDIC insured institutions based on the Q4 FDIC Quarterly Banking Profile released this week. Note: The FDIC reports the dollar value and not the total number of REOs. There is much more in the article.

15 hours ago 2 votes
Realtor.com Reports Active Inventory Up 27.8% YoY

What this means: On a weekly basis, Realtor.com reports the year-over-year change in active inventory and new listings. On a monthly basis, they report total inventory. For February, Realtor.com reported inventory was up 27.5% YoY, but still down 22.9% compared to the 2017 to 2019 same month levels.   Now - on a weekly basis - inventory is up 27.8% YoY. Realtor.com has monthly and weekly data on the existing home market. Here is their weekly report: Weekly Housing Trends View—Data for Week Ending March 8, 2025 • Active inventory increased, with for-sale homes 27.8% above year-ago levels • New listings—a measure of sellers putting homes up for sale—increased 8.3% Here is a graph of the year-over-year change in inventory according to realtor.com.  Inventory was up year-over-year for the 70th consecutive week.   New listings have increased recently but remain below typical pre-pandemic levels.

2 days ago 2 votes
Hotels: Occupancy Rate Decreased 1.4% Year-over-year

This will be something to watch. The Top 3 countries for tourist visits to the US in 2023 were: “We've already started the process of where that capacity is coming out.  A lot of it transborder, big drop in Canadian traffic to go into the U.S.”. This could impact hotel occupancy in the U.S. From STR: U.S. hotel results for week ending 8 March The U.S. hotel industry reported mixed year-over-year comparisons, according to CoStar’s latest data through 8 March. ... 2-8 March 2025 (percentage change from comparable week in 2024): Occupancy: 62.4% (-1.4%) emphasis added The following graph shows the seasonal pattern for the hotel occupancy rate using the four-week average. Click on graph for larger image. The 4-week average of the occupancy rate is tracking last year and is lower than the median rate for the period 2000 through 2024 (Blue). Note: Y-axis doesn't start at zero to better show the seasonal change. The 4-week average will increase seasonally for the next several weeks.

2 days ago 2 votes

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Trump-proofing Canada means ditching MasterCard and Visa

We're all busy doing our best to boycott U.S. products. I can't buy Special K cereal anymore, because it's made in the U.S. by Kellogg's. But I'm still buying Shreddies, which is made in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Even that's a grey area, since Shreddies is owned by Post, a big American company. Should I be boycotting it? Probably. However, the disturbing thing is that I'm paying for my carefully-curated basket of Canadian groceries with my MasterCard. If we really want to avoid U.S. products, we can't just vet the things we are buying. We also need to be careful about how we are doing our buying. Our Canadian credit cards are basically made-in-U.S. goods. They rely on the U.S-based Visa or MasterCard networks for processing. Each credit card transaction you make generates a few cents in revenue for these two American mega-corporations. It doesn't sound like much, but when multiplied by millions of Canadians using their cards every day, it adds up. Vigilant Canadians shouldn't be using them. Canadians who want to boycott American card networks have two options. Go back to paying with cash, which is 100% Canadian. Or transact with your debit card. Debit card transactions are routed via the made-in-Canada Interac debit network.* We're lucky to have a domestic debit card option. Our European friends are in a worse position, since many European countries (Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, and Austria) are entirely reliant on MasterCard and Visa for both debit and credit card transactions.  Unfortunately, going back to debit cards means doing without all of the consumer protection that credit cards offer in an online environment. Worse, you're giving up your credit card rewards or cash back. If you don't pay with your 2% cash back credit card, for instance, and use your debit card instead, which doesn't offer a reward, you're effectively losing out on $2 for every $100 you spend. This should illustrate to you, I hope, the golden shackles imposed on us by our U.S.-based credit cards. It's fairly easy to replace your American-grown tomatoes with Mexican ones or your U.S.-made car with a Japanese car. But networks, which tend towards monopolization, are not so easy to bypass. Which gets us into the meatier issue of national sovereignty. The difficulty we all face boycotting the MasterCard and Visa networks reveals how Canada has let itself become over-reliant on these critical pieces of U.S financial infrastructure. My fear is that our neighbour's political leadership is only going to fall further into authoritarianism and belligerence, eventually making a play to slowly annex Canada—not by invasion, but by "Canshluss". If so, this will involve using our dependencies on U.S. systems, including the card networks, to extract concessions from us. "Canada, if you don't do x for me," says Trump in 2026, "we're TURNING OFF all your credit cards!"  In anticipation, we need to remove this particular financial dependency, quick. We're already safe when it comes to debit cards; we've got Interac. But we need the same independence for our credit cards. More specifically, we need to pursue an end-goal in which all Canadian credit cards are "co-badged". That means our credit cards would be able to use both the Visa/Mastercard card networks and Interac (or, if Interac can't be repurposed for credit cards, some other yet-to-be-built domestic credit card network). With co-badging, if your credit card payment can't be executed by Visa because of a Trump freeze order, at least the Canadian network will still process it. This is how the French card system works. While much of Europe suffers from a massive dependency on MasterCard and Visa, France is unique in having built a 100% French card solution. The local Carte Bancaire (CB) network can process both French debit card transactions, like Interac can, but goes one step further by also handling French credit card purchases. Before paying for their groceries with a card, French card holders get to choose which network to use, the local one or the international one. THIS IS WHAT CANADA NEEDS: This French credit card, issued by Credite Agricole, is co-badged with the domestic Carte Bancaire (CB) network and the international MasterCard network. When incidents occur on one route (CB, for instance), traffic is automatically routed to the back-up route, MasterCard, and vice versa. I think that a Canadian solution to the Trump problem would look something like this French CB card. The incoming Carney government should move to co-sponsor a CB-style domestic credit card network along with the big banks (perhaps a simple upgrade to Interac will do?). All Canadian financial institutions that issue credit cards would be required to co-badge them so that Canadians can connect to this new network as well as Visa or MasterCard. Even if annexation never actually occurs, at least we've got a more robust card system in place to deal with outages arising from hacking or natural disasters. Along with France, we can take inspiration from India, which introduced their Visa/MasterCard alternative, Rupay, in 2012. Thirteen years later, RuPay is now a genuine competitor with the American card networks. I can't believe I'm saying this, but we can also use Russia as a model, which was entirely dependent on Visa and MasterCard for card payments until it deployed its Mir card network in 2016—in the nick of time before Visa and MasterCard cut ties in 2022. Europe will have to push harder, too. The EU has been trying to rid itself of its Visa and MasterCard addiction for over a decade now, without much luck. Its first attempt, the Euro Alliance of Payment Schemes, was abandoned in 2013.  (In fact, one of the reasons the European Central Bank is exploring its own digital currency is to provide an alternative to the American card networks.) As Canada builds out its own domestic credit card workaround, we can learn from the European mistakes. The U.S. is no longer a clear friend. Boycotting U.S. products is one thing. But if we truly want to reduce the external threat, we need to build our own card infrastructure—before it's too late. * In-person debit payments are processed by the Interac network. However, online debit card transactions default to the Visa or MasterCard networks. While Interac does allow for online purchases, many retailers don't offer the option, and when they do, the checkout process requires the user to log into their online banking, which is more of a hassle than using a card.

8 hours ago 2 votes
Q4 Update: Delinquencies, Foreclosures and REO

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Q4 Update: Delinquencies, Foreclosures and REO A brief excerpt: This entire housing cycle I’ve argued that we would NOT see a surge in foreclosures that would significantly impact house prices (as happened following the housing bubble) for two key reasons: 1) mortgage lending has been solid, and 2) most homeowners have substantial equity in their homes. This graph shows the nominal dollar value of Residential REO for FDIC insured institutions based on the Q4 FDIC Quarterly Banking Profile released this week. Note: The FDIC reports the dollar value and not the total number of REOs. There is much more in the article.

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