Americans' Average Monthly Mortgage Payment Tops $2000 For The First Time Ever

Gamer Backlash Hits Sony After PlayStation Price Hike: "Older Stuff Should Get Cheaper, Not Expensive" Gamers, already upset over rising memory, CPU, and GPU prices, woke up to more bad news this morning. This time, Sony posted a new entry on the PlayStation Blog announcing price hikes for the PS5, PS5 Pro, and PlayStation Portal, blaming “continued pressures in the global economic landscape.” "We know that price changes impact our community, and after careful evaluation, we found this was a necessary step to ensure we can continue delivering innovative, high-quality gaming...

UBS Finds Global Trade Structure "Surprisingly Stable" As AI Emerges As Growth Engine Despite ongoing Gulf-related energy shocks, mounting concerns over a potential energy cliff (read here), and UBS last month reactivating its supply chain stress-watch coverage, another UBS analyst noted Wednesday that the overall structure of global trade remains "surprisingly stable." Analyst Arend Kapteyn pointed out that the structure of global trade remains far more structurally stable than recent growth trends suggest, even as technology and AI-related categories have driven nearly 80% of recent trade growth while accounting for only...

What Causes Stagflation? Authored by Frank Shostak via The Mises Institute, In the late 1960’s Edmund Phelps and Milton Friedman challenged the popular view that there can be a sustainable trade-off between inflation and unemployment. In fact, over time, according to Friedman, expansionary central bank policies set the platform for lower economic growth and a higher rate of inflation (i.e., stagflation). A famous case of stagflation occurred during the 1974-75 period. In March 1975, industrial production fell by nearly 13 percent year-on-year while the yearly growth rate of the consumer price index (CPI) jumped to...