Friday Finances – With the FatNarwhal

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By: Michael Anthony Incorvaia

It’s Friday already and FatNarwhal is starting a new Friday Finances series, where we will simply catch everyone up on some of the major events that happened this week in the markets. This week we’ll look at what the European Central Bank did, Mortgages Rates, the Labor Markets, and Earnings.

The European Central Bank said this week that it is going to raise rates by another 0.75 points, which will move the rate above zero to .75%. This shows Europe having a continued fight against inflation, which is at a record high. This also goes along with the fact that the ECB also sees many troubles in the energy department as Oil prices look to only be going up. This is especially true now that Russia’s Nord Stream Pipeline has closed. This puts the ECB in a tight predicament. After all, they are forced to fight both extreme inflations, as well as oil prices that are uncontrollable because they are at the mercy of other countries.

Mortgage Rates hit an extremely high 5.89%, which also happens to be the highest level since 2008. These high mortgage rates and the looks that the Fed is going to continue to raise prices show the massive cooldown happening in the housing market now. This is also likely to force more people who would have been in between buying and renting to simply rent instead. This is because these high rates are likely to price many buyers out of the market and will overall slow the entire housing market down.

Last week we found that the US labor market added 315,000 jobs in August, and this week we found that U.S. jobless claims fell for a fourth straight week. The jobless numbers for August according to the labor department came in at 222,000, which happens to be less than the expected 228,000. These numbers put the unemployment rate at 3.7%, which is a slight rise from Julys 3.5%, and is a solid look for the economy because it showed that people still had jobs even with the slowing economy. The main concern now is when it pertains to the labor markets that they are tight right now, but the many economic problems are likely to have an effect. This effect is where we can see higher unemployment as many companies are forced to cut due to the continued rise in interest rates and slowing growth within the economy.

Finally, the major earnings of the week came from GameStop and Kroger. We saw continued resilience of the meme stock world with GameStop showing a narrower-than-expected loss which led the stock to show solid gains in the second half of the week. Kroger also beat their earnings today with its quarterly sales rising 9%. This led the company to make a 7% jump on Friday.

If you made it this far you have caught up on some of the noteworthy events that happened this week in the markets and now, it’s your decision where to go from here. And remember we are just Modern Narwhals, who do Modern Finances.

FATNARWHAL CO.