Ford Starts Its New All-Electric Era

MARKET MOVERS

• Ford starts its new all-electric era. Ford announced Friday that it had officially broken ground on the company’s Blue Oval electric vehicle manufacturing hub in Tennessee. The groundbreaking comes less than a year after Ford announced the plan to build facilities in Tennessee and Kentucky for both EV vehicle and battery assembly capacity.

• British pound plunges, bonds sink after the government announces tax cuts. Sterling dropped as low as $1.0960 at 3:40 p.m. London time, after a program of tax cuts, was unveiled in the House of Commons. Friday’s measures were billed by the government as heralding a new era for the U.K. focused on growth, and included a mix of tax cuts and investment incentives for businesses.

• Rents fell for the first time in over a year. The median rent in the top 50 metropolitan areas fell for the first time in nearly a year, dropping $10 off a peak reached in July, according to a recent Realtor.com® report. However, rents were still higher than they were a year ago, at a median of $1,771 a month, although this was the first time in the past 13 months that they rose only by single digits. Read more here.

• Luxury home sales plunge to a 10-year low, surpassing COVID levels. Luxury home sales in the US dove by 28.1% year over year during the 3 months ending Aug. 31, 2022 — eclipsing the 23.2% drop in luxury sales at the height of the pandemic, Redfin data shows. Rising interest rates, inflation, a tepid stock market, and economic uncertainty are causing luxury buyers to back off.
  

WHAT TO WATCH

• Goldman cuts year-end S&P 500 target to 3,600. The firm sees it falling even further in ‘hard landing’. Goldman’s new target for stocks takes into account that the Fed’s aggressive interest rate hikes to tame inflation will probably push the U.S. economy into a recession next year. The bank now sees the Fed tightening by another 0.75 percentage point in November, a half-point in December, and one-quarter point in February. Read more here.

• Tom Lee thinks stocks can still rally into year-end. Lee’s current year-end price target on the S&P 500 is 4,800, which implies a nearly 27% upside from Wednesday’s close. If inflation starts to improve sharply, which a lot of leading indicators show, he thinks markets are going to start to look at the Fed’s current path as sufficient to actually contain inflation. That is going to allow risk assets to rally. Read more here.

• Sticky times ahead for US consumers for the next 18 months, says Chamath Palihapitiya. He thinks the course of this year through 2023 and possibly early 2024 is going to be a grind. Unemployment will go back up, inflation will be sticky, real earnings will shrink, consumption will ebb, and earnings will not be that great. The silver lining is the start of the bottoming process for equity markets and it should be done by end of the year or early next year. Source(26:10)

• EV sales to hit an all-time high in 2022, IEA says. On the EV front, the IEA said global sales had doubled in 2021 to represent nearly 9% of the car market. Looking forward, 2022 was expected to see another all-time high for electric vehicle sales, lifting them to 13% of total light-duty vehicle sales globally. In the first quarter of 2022, EV sales came to 2 million, a 75% increase compared to the first three months of 2021.

• Larry Summers warns Pound may tumble past $1 on ‘naive’ UK policies. He thinks the UK is behaving a bit like an emerging market turning itself into a submerging market, Between Brexit, how far the Bank of England got behind the curve, and now these fiscal policies, he thinks Britain will be remembered for having pursued the worst macroeconomic policies of any major country in a long time.

• Porsche’s gray market trading points to a bumper debut. A week before Porsche AG’s first day of trading in Frankfurt, price indications already point to a strong debut for the sports-car maker seeking to defy markets with the biggest European initial public offering in a decade. The company was trading at as much as 17% above the top end of the 76.5 to 82.5-euro price range marketed at institutional and retail investors, according to unregulated gray market pricing.