Macro Briefing: 29 November 2023

* Fed official suggests central bank is done with rate hikes
* Global economy will slow in 2024, OECD predicts
* US car dealers say consumer demand for electric vehicles is weak
* Amazon announces new AI chatbot for businesses
* US home prices rise to a new record high in September
* US consumer confidence rebounds in November after 3 monthly declines
* US 10-year Treasury yield falls to two-month low on Tuesday:

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Macro Briefing: 27 November 2023

* Investors see rising odds of rate cut within four months
* Black Friday spending rises to record $9.8 billion, up 7.5% vs. last year
* Is the surge in money-market fund balances a bullish signal for markets?
* Another study reaffirms that buy-and-hold investing is tough to beat
* Are economists flying blind due to sliding response rates to official surveys?
* US economic activity remains weak in November via PMI survey data:

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The Holiday Starts… Now

It’s only Tuesday on the calendar, but the holiday week has already started at The Capital Spectator’s world headquarters. But we shall return. Come Monday, Nov. 27, the lights will once again burn bright. Meanwhile… Happy Thanksgiving!

Macro Briefing: 20 November 2023

* Microsoft hires Sam Altman, ousted CEO of OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT
* Radical libertarian populist Javier Milei elected president of Argentina
* Positive earnings surprises have fueled stock market rally, says strategist
* Strong labor market is why US avoids recession after rate hikes
* Foreign demand for US Treasuries slides as supply rises
* US housing starts rise for second month in October
* OPEC+ considers further oil production cuts as price sags:

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Book Bits: 18 November 2023

Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative
Jennifer Burns
Review via The New Republic
Jennifer Burns’s biography of the economist Milton Friedman arrives at a moment when his legacy is increasingly questioned. For no one is more closely linked with neoliberalism than Friedman, who preached the virtues of markets in popular books, on public television, and from his position at the University of Chicago. One of Friedman’s major accomplishments, as Burns describes it, is to have crafted the “basic intellectual consensus about free markets and limited government that powered twentieth-century American conservatism.” For his admirers, Friedman was a farsighted prophet of market economics, a first-rate academic who saw that the world needed more capitalism, not less, to deliver global prosperity. For others, he represents the market fundamentalism that has allowed the wealthy to capture too great a share of the gains of global growth in the neoliberal era, and led to the financial crisis of 2008.

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