Treasury rates are up but…

10 year Treasury rates vs. apartment builiding investment loan rates thru July 2015
Click on image for full size

For this month’s post on apartment building investment loan rates and the key 10yr Treasury (T10) we’re looking at the longer trend back to the beginning of 2013. The news has been full of talk about rising interest rates but looking at the chart above we can see that while the T10 is up off its recent low of 1.68% in the end of January it’s still more than 50 basis points below the highs it hit in September and December 2013 (2.98% and 3.04% respectively).

In turn the 10 year apartment loan we track has been treading water around the 4.3% mark for the last nine months and essentially it’s back to where it was in early 2013 before the Continue reading Treasury rates are up but…

What’s your personal GDP- Gross Domestic Pleasure?

Most of the economic statistics that we rely on to understand how the economy is doing (and contribute to the apartment building investment cycle) were created in the 1930s and ’40s, smack dab in the middle of the Industrial Age. They haven’t changed much

What's your personal GDP- Gross Domestic Pleasure?
Click the image to see the thought provoking NYT Magazine article that inspired this post: “The Economy’s Missing Metrics”. Illustration by Andrew Rae

since then, you can find out a lot about woodworking-machine-setters but all web developers are thrown into a single category. Such as they are they were an attempt to measure something that seems quite radical especially coming from economists: Is the government making life better or worse for its citizens? Not how many pairs of shoes were manufactured, how long they sat in warehouses and the average price they sold for.

The intellectual leader for this radical thought was Simon Kuznets who as an immigrant had a special respect for the promises of democracy. He believed politicians should be Continue reading What’s your personal GDP- Gross Domestic Pleasure?