Business

By Wolf Richter of Wolf Street

Ballooning Condo Glut ensnares preconstruction speculators.

Miami-Dade’s spectacular condo flipping mania is in turmoil, with sales plunging, inventory-for-sale soaring, and new supply flooding the market. It’s not like Miami hasn’t been through this before.

In February, existing home sales of all types fell 10% year-over-year, to 1,835 homes. These sales “do not include Miami’s multi-billion dollar new construction condo market,” the Miami Association of Realtors clarified in its report on March 23.

Last week, the Office for National Statistics released the inflation results for the British economy. Even though most analysts weren’t expecting any huge differences, the numbers (updated until February) paint a completely different picture. In February, the inflation rate increased rather sharply. On a month-on-month basis, the CPI increased by 0.7% (whereas January was a month with deflation). The current YoY inflation rate based on the CPI is 2.3%.

‘No big deal’, you might think. But in this case it is.

Having failed to "rebalance" the oil market in the first six months following the implementation of the Vienna production cut agreement, with crude inventories in the US hitting all time highs in the interim...

Following the worst week for stocks since the US election, the reflation trade that was launched by the Trump election now appears solidly dead, with the dollar and commodities sliding, inflation expectations crumbling, and junk bonds - where investor euphoria had reached dramatic proportions - being hit the hardest. As Bank of America commented last Thursday, "the last few weeks we have seen wobbles in high yield; a full 2 months earlier than we anticipated.

AS a result of countless failures by central banks to normalize monetary policy over the past 7 years, the market - especially bonds and rates - has become openly cynical and outright skeptical regarding the possibility of a successful renormalization of policy by global central banks. After all, Japan has been trying to do that for over 30 years and has yet to succeed; the ECB hiked in 2011 resulting in near collapse of the Eurozone.