Rental Vacancy in Manhattan, New York, Reached record last year with an increase of $3,150, topping the rents in February

According to a report, median rent last month was the highest on record, which was surprising since rental activity typically builds from the spring to a peak in late summer.

The median cost of renting an apartment in Manhattan was $4,175 in March. The highest rent since July was $4,150, up 12.8% from a year ago and up 2% from February.

While the median rent for all sizes of apartments taken together has reached a new high, this is not the skyrocketing rent rise seen in 2021, said Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of Miller Samuel.

The opposite of rising rents is not necessarily falling rents, it is stabilizing rents, Miller said. The price for new rentals has been bobbing along, not going way up or way down.

“It is part of a long process since the summer. There was expectation that rents would fall and that didn’t happen. Rents peaked last summer. Every month since then, they’ve been moving sideways,” he said. “With a modest increase, it was just enough to set a new record.”

“The drive in more leasing activity is parallel in the rise in mortgage rates that has continued to push people into the rental market,” said Miller. Unaffordability is not the only uncertainty.

Listing inventory for rentals in Manhattan was near record lows a year ago and has been climbing higher. Inventory was higher year over year, which resulted in more activity.

Premarket Stocks Trading: How Wall Street is Fighting the Banks and Wall Street? An Analysis of Retail Sales and Credit Card Spending in the US

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Consumers are in charge of the strength of the US economy. If people are spending money, companies keep employees in their jobs … and those workers keep spending. In theory, anyway.

Wall Street is worried that the retail sales report on Friday will show that the American consumer is pulling back.

Retail sales fell 0.4% in the month of March, according to economists. Goldman and Bank of America think core sales have slowed down by about 1%. Retail sales decreased by 0.4% in February.

The March data come just days after Federal Reserve meeting minutes revealed that central bank economists think the recent banking crisis will tilt the US into recession this year. This is the first time in the current yearlong rate-hiking cycle that Fed economists have forecast a recession.

Bank of America credit card data shows that spending is cooling. After starting the year out strong, the bank’s credit and debit card spending eased in March to 0.1% year-over-year growth, said analysts on Thursday. That’s the slowest pace since February 2021.

Analysts agree that any possible drawbacks would have little to do with the regional banking crisis.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/14/business/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

Amazon Inc. is Using Generative Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Customer Experiences Across a Wide Range of Consumer, Seller, Brand and Creator Experiences

“The slowdown in Federal tax refunds in March, as reported by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), contributed to the weakness in spending,” they wrote. The IRS issued $84 billion in tax refunds in March, about $25 billion less than in the previous March. Analysts from BofA estimate that is about 1.5% of monthly disposable income.

According to a survey, consumer debt grew by almost five times as much during the last three months of the year as during the same period a year earlier.

The number of bankruptcies is increasing. US corporate bankruptcy filings hit a 12-year high in the first two months of 2023, with 183 companies filing for Chapter 11, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data.

Credit rating agencies claim Bed Bath & Beyond and many other chains are on a watch list. These companies have been struggling for a long time and are vulnerable to economic downturns.

In a letter to shareholders on Thursday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company is “investing heavily” the technology that underpins chat bots like ChatGPT.

“We have been working on our own [large language models] for a while now, believe it will transform and improve virtually every customer experience, and will continue to invest substantially in these models across all of our consumer, seller, brand, and creator experiences,” Jassy wrote in his letter to shareholders.

Since the launch of the public version of the software in late November, multiple companies have talked about the benefits of using generative artificial intelligence technology to create compelling essays, stories and visuals.

Jassy told CNBC that they want to work off of a model that is already big and great, and then have the ability to change it for their own purposes.