Author: Money Mechanics

Dallas Federal Reserve President Lorie Logan has warned that the central bank may need to increase interest rates this year to rein in inflation before it gets out of control. One of the Federal Reserve’s most hawkish members and a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), Logan made her comments during a moderated event at the University of Texas at El Paso on Wednesday. “I’m increasingly concerned that higher interest rates could be necessary later this year to fully restore price stability,” said Logan. Her remarks come just two weeks before new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh helms his first…

is letting out some air. has slipped into the mid-$90s near $94, with the global benchmark dropping below $97, both snapping a three-day rally as a fresh Israel-Lebanon ceasefire and modest optimism on an Iran agreement bleed a slice of the war premium out of the tape. After a stretch where every headline pushed crude higher, the market is finally fading on the prospect of de-escalation. But this is the war premium exhaling, not collapsing — the conflict is still live, the Strait of Hormuz is still half-choked, and U.S. inventories just drained for a sixth straight week. The pullback…

I read recently – I can’t find where – that stock/bond correlations in the US are the highest (most positive) they have been in decades. This of course is bad news for investors who commonly allocate to both stocks and bonds with the expectation that adding bonds will reduce the risk of a portfolio not only because they have a lower natural volatility than do stocks but also because the expectation of negative correlations between them have the effect of lowering the volatility of the portfolio further (since the variance of a 2-asset portfolio is equal to the weighted sum…

Would-be home sellers are stepping back as high rates and economic jitters keep buyers on the sidelines. New listings of U.S. homes for sale are down 1.3% week over week, one of the biggest declines of the year.  Prospective home sellers are backing off because homebuying demand has slowed down. Pending home sales ticked down 0.2% week over week during the week ending May 31–a small decline, but the third in a row. Mortgage-purchase applications fell to their lowest level in six weeks.  There are a couple reasons house hunters–and, by extension, would-be sellers–are stepping back: Housing costs are high,…

Oura Ring 5 (top) and Oura Ring 4 (bottom). You can see the small but distinct size difference between the rose gold smart rings.  Nina Raemont/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysI wore the Oura Ring 5 for a day.It’s more comfortable and smaller on my finger.Sometimes the best upgrades are the ones you can’t see.When you got a chunky smart ring around your finger, size matters. Oura unveiled its super-slim Oura Ring 5 in late May, and it’s visibly smaller and lighter than the Oura Ring 4 the smart ring company unveiled two years…

New York Knicks star Trey Jemison III and his fiancée, Alex Jean Glover, enjoyed a very special personal milestone just weeks before the team secured its spot in the 2026 NBA Finals—by snapping up what could well become their marital home.Interestingly, the couple’s new property is not located anywhere near New York. Rather, it’s in Texas, the home state of the Knicks’ NBA Finals rivals, the San Antonio Spurs.Jemison and Glover, both 26, closed on their new Dallas-area dwelling on March 20, property records show, paying just over $880,000 for the newly built five-bedroom, 4.5-bathroom abode, which spans more than…

(Image credit: Getty Images)The oldest of the three main equity indexes hit new highs on Thursday, helped by its heavy exposure to blue-chip healthcare and financial names. But it was a difficult day for one of the biggest publicly traded companies in the world – a major player in the AI boom. At the same time, technology was one of only two sectors in the red at the end of a trading session defined by some semiconductor weakness but broad strength just about everywhere else.By the closing bell, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had added 1.7% to 51,561 – another…

The digital assets market, which had already been struggling for months now, is now witnessing a bloodbath after Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin (BTC) treasury firm Strategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) announced the sale of 32 BTC. The total cryptocurrency market cap has declined from $2.57 trillion on the announcement day on June 1 to $2.38 trillion at press time. So, the crypto market has lost $190 billion this month. Bitcoin (BTC) has dropped from $73,800 to below $67,000 during the same period. It is the cryptocurrency’s worst price range since February this year. Similarly, Ethereum (ETH) has fallen from $2,000 to $1,870, and…

Just when you thought the AI data center boom couldn’t get any crazier, Meta has gone and built data centers in tents. The strategy appears to borrow in equal parts from Tesla and xAI. In a bid to cut construction time in half, Meta has built six tents — or “rapid deployment structures” as the company describes them — outside of New Albany, Ohio, according to Michael Thomas, founder of Cleanview, which tracks data center deployments. Thomas’ findings aren’t totally new. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to the Information last year about his plan to use weatherproof tents to house the…

(Oil Price) – The United States still feels oil shocks. It just doesn’t feel them the way it did when America was dancing to disco and waiting in gas lines. If the Fed is right, the idea that every oil shock leads to recession is outdated.   A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston finds that rising domestic oil production has fundamentally changed how higher crude prices ripple through the U.S. economy. The result is a country that remains vulnerable to energy inflation but is far less likely to suffer the kind of employment damage that accompanied the oil…