Latest news with #April2023
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Falling home prices are raising the risk of a deeper correction as the housing market cracks under high mortgage rates
Recent housing market indicators show persistent weakness in home prices, including consecutive month-over-month declines. That's as housing supply has increased while demand has stayed tepid amid still-high mortgage rates hovering around 7%. The slump in prices raises the risk of a prolonged downturn, according to Capital Economics. The housing market has largely been frozen since mortgage rates shot up a few years ago, but recent indicators have pointed to the possibility of an extended slump in prices. The latest Case-Shiller home price report showed a 0.3% monthly fall in the 20-city index in April, steeper than March's downwardly revised 0.2% dip. In a note on Tuesday, Thomas Ryan, North America economist at Capital Economics, warned that the back-to-back declines could signal a 'deeper correction' ahead. 'After falling in March, the further 0.3% m/m decline in house prices in April raises the risk that prices are entering a sustained downturn, as the market finally buckles under the weight of near-7% mortgage rates,' he added. On a three-month annualized basis, house prices fell by 0.4%, Ryan noted. And while prices are up on a year-over-year basis, it's still the slowest pace since August 2023 The Case-Shiller data isn't the only red flag, as the FHFA price index showed a 0.4% monthly drop. 'Clearly, the existing homes market is losing momentum as demand remains anemic due to sky-high borrowing costs, while more people put their home up for sale, forcing sellers to adjust their price expectations,' Ryan wrote. Previous data also line up with a downtrend. The median sale price of an existing home has dropped for five consecutive months on a seasonally adjusted basis. That's as the number of homes available for sale is back around pre-pandemic levels. To be sure, lower prices also make homes more attractive, potentially spurring more demand and representing some relief for younger Americans who are looking to buy but have been priced out of the market. But economists at Citi Research flagged ongoing headwinds, attributing the price declines to high mortgage rates, elevated uncertainty, softening consumer demand, and a weakening labor market. In addition, slowing activity in the housing sector overall is an early sign that underlying demand is weakening this year, Citi said in recent note. 'While prices could still fluctuate month-to-month, consistent softening in median sale prices suggests the trend is likely to continue in more stable measures of new home prices like the Case Shiller index,' economists predicted. Capital Economics said there are still some reasons to believe a prolonged downturn can be avoided. Ryan pointed out at that supply remains relatively tight overall, despite some expansion lately. Meanwhile, the mortgage market is also healthy, reinforced by more than a decade of stricter lending standards instituted after the Great Financial Crash. Plus, continued resilience in the labor market should prevent forced selling in the housing market, he added. 'All that being said, the weakness of the recent price data mean that we have to start taking the prospect of an extended period of house price declines more seriously, which is something we will be considering for our upcoming US Housing Outlook,' Ryan said. This story was originally featured on Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Falling home prices are raising the risk of a deeper correction as the housing market cracks under high mortgage rates
Recent housing market indicators show persistent weakness in home prices, including consecutive month-over-month declines. That's as housing supply has increased while demand has stayed tepid amid still-high mortgage rates hovering around 7%. The slump in prices raises the risk of a prolonged downturn, according to Capital Economics. The housing market has largely been frozen since mortgage rates shot up a few years ago, but recent indicators have pointed to the possibility of an extended slump in prices. The latest Case-Shiller home price report showed a 0.3% monthly fall in the 20-city index in April, steeper than March's downwardly revised 0.2% dip. In a note on Tuesday, Thomas Ryan, North America economist at Capital Economics, warned that the back-to-back declines could signal a 'deeper correction' ahead. 'After falling in March, the further 0.3% m/m decline in house prices in April raises the risk that prices are entering a sustained downturn, as the market finally buckles under the weight of near-7% mortgage rates,' he added. On a three-month annualized basis, house prices fell by 0.4%, Ryan noted. And while prices are up on a year-over-year basis, it's still the slowest pace since August 2023 The Case-Shiller data isn't the only red flag, as the FHFA price index showed a 0.4% monthly drop. 'Clearly, the existing homes market is losing momentum as demand remains anemic due to sky-high borrowing costs, while more people put their home up for sale, forcing sellers to adjust their price expectations,' Ryan wrote. Previous data also line up with a downtrend. The median sale price of an existing home has dropped for five consecutive months on a seasonally adjusted basis. That's as the number of homes available for sale is back around pre-pandemic levels. To be sure, lower prices also make homes more attractive, potentially spurring more demand and representing some relief for younger Americans who are looking to buy but have been priced out of the market. But economists at Citi Research flagged ongoing headwinds, attributing the price declines to high mortgage rates, elevated uncertainty, softening consumer demand, and a weakening labor market. In addition, slowing activity in the housing sector overall is an early sign that underlying demand is weakening this year, Citi said in recent note. 'While prices could still fluctuate month-to-month, consistent softening in median sale prices suggests the trend is likely to continue in more stable measures of new home prices like the Case Shiller index,' economists predicted. Capital Economics said there are still some reasons to believe a prolonged downturn can be avoided. Ryan pointed out at that supply remains relatively tight overall, despite some expansion lately. Meanwhile, the mortgage market is also healthy, reinforced by more than a decade of stricter lending standards instituted after the Great Financial Crash. Plus, continued resilience in the labor market should prevent forced selling in the housing market, he added. 'All that being said, the weakness of the recent price data mean that we have to start taking the prospect of an extended period of house price declines more seriously, which is something we will be considering for our upcoming US Housing Outlook,' Ryan said. This story was originally featured on
Forbes
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Vibe Coding: It's Four Months Old. What's Up?
Female freelance developer coding and programming. Coding on two with screens with code language and ... More application. What is vibe coding, anyway? The term, coined by Andrej Karpathy a few months ago, is now shorthand for an entire shift in the way that we view software engineering. It's the idea that AI is 'hands-off' in terms of code generation: the machine just takes the human's inputs, and comes up with source code on its own. Although LLMs are not 100% autonomous with this yet, and there's often a need for some debugging, vibe coding essentially asks the programmer to back off and let the AI do its thing. In contemporary coverage of the phenomenon, Forbes Council member Shubham Nigam quotes Rhiannon Williams of the MIT Technology Review: 'Not all AI-assisted coding is vibe coding. To truly vibe-code, you have to be prepared to let the AI fully take control and refrain from checking and directly tweaking the code it generates as you go along—surrendering to the vibes.' So while it's a colloquial term (good vibes, man!) it's also a request for the human in the loop to take distance – not to stand over the LLM's shoulder as it creates. Here's more from a recent panel at Imagination in Action in April. Nikolay Vyahhi of Hyperskill interviews Artem Lukoianov, Heena Purohit, and Aldo Pareja about this trend. 'I guess the whole beauty of this term is because it so accurately presents what's actually happening,' Lukoianov said. 'You don't even have to read the code that it produces. You … just basically teleprompt to the system, it generates a part of the code for you, and then, quite often, because developers are notorious for being lazy, you don't even read the codes.' 'You don't even try to understand what the code is doing,' added Pareja, theorizing about what will happen when IDEs and other tools start to incorporate unit testing. 'You don't even read the code. You're just feeling it.' Panelist Zach Lloyd talked about the realities of source code management. '(Developers will) get into trouble, and get and they'll try to vibe their way out of it, or they'll get into trouble with their production system and try to vibe their way out of it,' he said. 'So in the terminal, we see it goes beyond producing code, to this whole feeling of: 'let me see if the AI can just fix this thing for me, and maybe I won't have to understand exactly what it's doing.' Lloyd described this power as a kind of double-edged sword: on the one hand, it's, as he said, a 'magical' thing for a developer who feels stuck. On the other hand, he suggested, it can be dangerous for the human coder not to know what the system is doing at all. Panelist Heena Purohit pointed to some challenges with letting the AI have its own project. She argued the systems are not typically good at 'distance thinking,' or how various components of a system interact. 'Sure, you can have millions of lines of code be generated in minutes or seconds, but you still need to understand what the code is actually doing, so that you can troubleshoot it and debug it when you need to,' she said, suggesting that in many cases, scaling might be a problem. By contrast, Lukoianov gave a sort of qualified opinion that we are mostly there, and will get there soon. '(Vibe coding capability) is already good enough for us to stop coding anything,' he said. 'To me, it's more the question of how we engineer the system around this… how do we … provide the correct information to the LLM, how do we summarize our code base, and how do we provide the right tools to the LLM to actually perform … better? in my personal opinion, I feel that like the LLM is already there. It's all about, how do we properly provide this information about your code base, about what you want, about any regulations, security issues that are around there. So it's all just about the correct information, correct inputs, correct tools, to the LLMs, and eventually we'll get there.' In the 1980s, he pointed out, we had to be very close to the hardware – now, it's different. 'You don't think that much about operating systems,' he said. 'You don't think that much about hardware, unless you're working in something very specialized.' Regardless of the change, Pareja argued that full stack developers are still valuable. 'If you're using (tools) to synchronize different processes, and you have a million processes, your system is going to break,' he said. 'You need to understand these constraints.' If I was going to boil down some of the biggest ideas in this panel, I think most of them would be around the need for coding knowledge to manage the detail and periphery of systems development. In other words, the AI can do everything, but it might not do it 100% the way that you need it to be done. And there's that old adage: if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself. Maybe LLMs get us 80% of the way there without any oversight, but skipping the context and being completely ignorant of what the machine is doing is typically not a good idea, partly for the reasons that the panelists laid out. So the human in the loop is still relevant for now. But the bottom line is that vibe coding is something so new and fundamental that we'll probably be spending a lot of time figuring out how to do it best.
CBC
13-06-2025
- Business
- CBC
Manufacturing sales fall 2.8 per cent in April, biggest monthly drop since 2023
Statistics Canada says manufacturing sales fell 2.8 per cent in April, the largest monthly drop since October 2023, as the tariff dispute with the United States hit the industry. The agency says manufacturing sales stand at their lowest level since January 2022 after a second straight monthly drop. Drops in sales of petroleum and coal products (down 10.9 per cent), motor vehicles (down 8.3 per cent) and primary metals (down 4.4 per cent) drove the decline. "Manufacturing and wholesale sales were both weaker than expected in April, suggesting monthly GDP may also be revised lower relative to its first estimate," wrote Andrew Grantham, senior economist at CIBC Capital Markets. While the trade war kicked off in March, April marked the first full month of tariffs from the United States in many sectors — particularly targeting Canada's steel, aluminum and automotive industries. Roughly half of manufacturers surveyed by Statistics Canada say they were being affected by tariffs in some form in April, as did 43 per cent of wholesalers. A separate release from Statistics Canada says wholesale sales fell 2.3 per cent in April, with the motor vehicles parts and accessories subsector leading the drop.
News.com.au
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Judge declares mistrial on one of three Harvey Weinstein rape charges
The mistrial ruling came one day after the jury convicted Weinstein on a separate sex abuse charge. It acquitted him on a second charge. Weinstein, once one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, faced a retrial that began on 23 April after a New York State appeals court overturned his 2020 conviction last year. He was accused by prosecutors of raping an aspiring and assaulting two other women. Weinstein pleaded not guilty and has denied assaulting anyone or having non-consensual sex.
