10 Things You Need to Know: March 4, 2025
Key data releases this week include: ISM Manufacturing (Mon), factory orders (Wed), ISM Services (Wed), Beige Book (Wed), trade balance (Thu), consumer credit (Fri), and nonfarm payrolls (Fri).
Haver
February 25, 2025
U.S. house prices rose 0.4% m/m in December after rises of 0.4% in November, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) House Price Index. The year-on-year rate of increase accelerated to 4.7% in December.
Haver
February 27, 2025
Real GDP growth of 2.3% (SAAR) last quarter was unrevised from the estimate issued last month. It followed a 3.1% gain in the third quarter and 3.0% growth in Q2. The increase matched expectations in the Action Economics Forecast Survey. Growth during the four quarters of 2024 fell to 2.5% from 3.2% in 2023.
Haver
February 28, 2025
Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) fell 0.2% (+5.6% y/y) after rising 0.8% in December. A 0.2% increase was expected in the Action Economics Forecast Survey. Personal income rose 0.9% (4.6% y/y) in January, after a rise of 0.4% in December. A 0.4% gain was expected. Meanwhile, the PCE chain price index rose 0.3% (2.5% y/y) during January, the same as in December. The price index excluding food & energy rose 0.3% (2.6% y/y) last month.
Reuters, BBC, The Guardian
February 26, 2025
US President Donald Trump has announced plans to impose 25% tariffs on the European Union, claiming the EU was established to disadvantage the United States. The tariffs would affect a wide range of products, including cars. The EU has vowed to respond “firmly and immediately” to the “unjustified” trade barriers.
Barron’s
March 3, 2025
Historically, gold has been considered a store of value—and for good reason. There’s a limited supply—all of the gold in the world could be melted into a cube measuring 25 yards on each side, roughly the volume of one floor of an office building—and miners are only able to increase it by 1%-2% a year despite their best efforts, according to the World Gold Council. Central bank purchases exceeded 1,000 tons for a third year in a row in 2024.
Barron’s
March 3, 2025
Apollo Global Management Chief Economist Torsten Sløk says there are an estimated two related private-sector jobs, such as contractors, that could be imperiled for each one lost at the federal level. A back-of-the-envelope calculation puts upward of a million folks affected directly and indirectly by cutbacks. But that is in a labor force of 160 million. The cumulative net impact might be an increase of 0.1-to-0.2 percentage points in the historically low 4% jobless rate.
Barron’s
March 3, 2025
Rates traders now expect three quarter-point cuts by year end in the Fed’s federal-funds rate-target range, currently 4.25% to 4.5%, from predicting a single trim as recently as Feb. 13, according to the CME FedWatch site. In effect, fed-funds futures traders have leapfrogged Fed officials, who had penciled in two quarter-point cuts by the end of 2025 in the most recent Summary of Economic projections, published last December.
Bloomberg
March 2, 2025
Investors are increasingly positioning against the dollar, citing signs of a cooling US economy and potential damage from President Donald Trump’s tariff plans. While the dollar recently surged following tariff announcements, market expectations for Federal Reserve rate cuts have grown, diminishing the dollar’s appeal.
CNBC
February 26, 2025
Katie Stockton, CMT, founder and managing partner at Fairlead Strategies, notes that the S&P broke below its 50-day moving average and believes there’s risk of further declines down to support around 5,783 but said it doesn’t feel like a major correction is underway. “This year, to us, is going to be likely more of a consolidation … We’re watching the secular bull trend, but it needs to take a pause at times, and we think that 2025 will be a pause year for the market.”