Slowing Inflation Primes G-7 Central Banks for June
Inflation-related releases across the Group of Seven will prime central bankers for crucial June interest-rate decisions, just as they meet in Italy to discuss the state of the world economy.
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Inflation-related releases across the Group of Seven will prime central bankers for crucial June interest-rate decisions, just as they meet in Italy to discuss the state of the world economy.
Big US bond investors have been aggressively shifting money into long-dated notes, betting that the unloved asset class will be one of the winners from eventual interest rate cuts.
A measure of underlying US inflation cooled in April for the first time in six months, a small step in the right direction for Federal Reserve officials looking to start cutting interest rates this year.
Emerging-market currencies dipped Friday on dwindling optimism over Federal Reserve rate cuts, paring their fourth-straight week of gains.
The owner of a historic office building in Manhattan’s Financial District has filed bankruptcy to sell the property, which has been subject to foreclosure and suffered from a lack of tenants due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
May 2, 2019
BNN Bloomberg
,Home sales in the Greater Vancouver Area continued to fall in April as demand remained weak.
A total of 1,829 homes were sold in the region last month, a 29.1 per cent decrease from the 2,579 sales in the same month last year. However, there was a 5.9 per cent increase in sales from the 1,727 homes sold in March, according the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver (REBGV).
The real estate board blamed government intervention for continuing to hinder sales activity.
“The federal government’s mortgage stress test has reduced buyers’ purchasing power by about 20 per cent, which is causing people at the entry-level side of the market to struggle to secure financing,” said REBGV President Ashley Smith in a release Thursday.
“Suppressing housing activity through government policy not only reduces home sales, it harms the job market, economic growth and creates pent-up demand.”
There has been a growing chorus of calls for mortgage stress test rules to be revisited so that they can become more flexible. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions introduced its B-20 guidelines, which applies a stress test to uninsured mortgages, in January 2018, and has been partly credited with cooling the country’s once-hot housing markets.
The continued slowdown in sales last month came as more inventory flooded the market. Indeed, there were 5,742 newly-listed homes for the region in the month, a 16- per-cent increase compared with March when 4,949 new properties were up for sale. There are 14,357 homes currently up for grabs, which is a 46.2 per cent increase from the same month last year.
“There are more homes for sale in our market today than we’ve seen since October 2014,” Smith said. “This trend is more about reduced demand than increased supply.”
While Vancouver housing market remains one of the most expensive in the country, home prices in the region continued to fall, with the composite benchmark price down 8.5 per cent year-over-year in April to $1,008,400.