A Central-Bank Power Shift Is Coming

For about 20 minutes on Wednesday, the market looked a little rattled...

The catalyst was President Donald Trump reportedly telling a room full of Republican lawmakers on Tuesday that he plans to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell "soon."

Mr. Market isn't a fan of surprises. The S&P 500 Index went from being up 0.2% on Wednesday morning to down almost 0.6% in about 20 minutes. But then it reversed direction after Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that firing Powell would be "highly unlikely."

By the end of the day, the benchmark S&P 500 had finished slightly higher.

Perhaps the episode was a test to see how the market would react to the idea of replacing Powell before his term is up in May 2026. (It wasn't bullish in the very short term.) It also remains to be seen whether firing Powell would be deemed legal if it did happen.

But the broader point when it comes to White House-Fed relations (and what it could mean for the market) is that signs point to lower interest rates eventually...

Seeking "low-interest people"...

The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in America, June 2025: The Price Drops & Gains in 33 Large Expensive Metros

The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in America, June 2025: The Price Drops & Gains in 33 Large Expensive Metros

US home prices nearly flat year-over-year, but fell in 21 of our 33 metros: Austin, Tampa, Miami, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Dallas, Phoenix, Orlando, Atlanta, Denver, Raleigh, Houston, Seattle… YoY gains shrink further in Boston, Chicago, New York…

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

The year-over-year price gains of mid-tier single-family homes, condos, and co-ops in the US nearly vanished in June: prices rose by just 0.2% compared to June a year ago. But that wasn’t equally spread around.

Of the 33 largest and most expensive metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) that we track here, the number with YoY price drops has expanded every month this year. At the end of 2024, only 6 of the 33 metros had year-over-year price drops. In June, the number rose to 21 (from 18 in May). The three additions: Los Angeles, San Jose, and Nashville. And the YoY price drops worsened in nearly all of them, including in San Diego (from -1.9% in May to -2.4% in June).

In the US overall, the year-over-year price gains have been losing steam for over a year, after the spurt in 2023 and early 2024, whittled down the YoY price gain in June to just 0.2%. But it wasn’t spread equally:

Chaos in Housing, Crypto, Gold, Silver & War – John Rubino

By Greg Hunter

Analyst and financial writer John Rubino has been warning of a currency crisis, especially since the so-called Big Beautiful Bill passed Congress. President Trump signed it into law on the Fourth of July. America’s credit was downgraded, and we are now set to explode the deficit $20 trillion in the next 10 years. That will be inflationary, but before we get there, we will have a crushing crash in home prices. Right now, the residential home market is rolling over with inventories surging and prices about to collapse. Rubino says, “You get this huge increase in inventory in the housing market. In other words, homes for sale go way up, but still, nobody can buy them. Then people really panic, and they start cutting the asking price of their house really dramatically until prices fall to a place where people can afford them again. In today’s market, that means a 30% to 40% drop in house prices. We are at the very beginning of that right now. . .. In the next couple of years, you are going to see home prices drop, and then the drop is going to become disorderly. Then you are going to see bankruptcies really hit housing.”