The Rebrew Intelligencer

Home prices across the country rose 2.1 per cent in the year to August, up from 1.9 per cent in July, according to the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller national index released on Tuesday. Consumer prices rose 3.4 per cent over the same twelve months, so S&P Dow Jones Indices said that home prices have now fallen in real terms for the 15th month in a row.

The 20 cities the index follows are far apart. Chicago led with a gain of 6.7 per cent, and Seattle fell 2 per cent. The two tracked cities nearest the Upstate have barely moved: prices in Charlotte stood 0.6 per cent above a year earlier, and prices in Atlanta 0.5 per cent.

Rebecca Kaufman of S&P Dow Jones Indices said the usual slowing after summer "is obscuring some underlying strength in home prices," and added that "Affordability, however, remains challenging."

A rendering of Westinghouse's planned plant for richer reactor fuel at Hopkins, S.C.

Courtesy of Westinghouse Electric Company

COLUMBIA, Oct. 28. Richland County drew about $1.06 billion in announced factory investment in the eight days ended Wednesday, according to the state Commerce Department. Nearly all of it came on Oct. 21 from Westinghouse, which said it will spend about $1 billion to expand its Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility at Hopkins and to build a new plant on its Bluff Road campus for a richer reactor fuel, uranium enriched to between 5 and 8 per cent, with operations expected to begin in 2030.

On Tuesday SteelFab, a Charlotte steel fabricator, said it will invest $30 million and hire 100 people at 1030 Metso Way in Columbia, putting an underused building back into manufacturing use, with operations expected by the end of the year. On Wednesday Brose Sitech, a seat maker with its headquarters in Poland, said it will invest $29.5 million and hire 330 people in a 140,000-square-foot plant in the Scout Motors Supplier Park at Blythewood, its first manufacturing plant in the United States.

Brose Sitech's plant is to deliver complete sets of seats to Scout Motors' assembly plant just in time. The seat plant is expected to open in 2027, and Scout's own plant has not yet opened.

SPARTANBURG, S.C., Oct. 22. Spartanburg County Council voted 4 to 1 on Oct. 22 to approve, on first reading, a development agreement for the NorthMark and Valara data center on Pine Street, a 457-megawatt project with its own natural gas power plant. Councilman Monier Abusaft voted no, and Councilwoman Jessica Coker was absent. The council had failed to approve the agreement at its meeting three days earlier. The agreement comes on top of a fee-in-lieu-of-tax deal the council passed in 2025, before the public knew how large the project would be. State regulators issued an air permit in September for 11 gas turbines that add 408 megawatts of generating capacity at the site.

The agreement was authorized through the county's recent moratorium on data centers, which limits new ones to 65 megawatts. County officials believe the moratorium applies to the NorthMark project because the project still needs a second permit to be finished. The county's two other data center projects, at the Tyger River Industrial Park and on Jones Road, are 65 megawatts or smaller and draw their power from the grid.

Under the agreement, the developers must hold a community meeting every year and report yearly to the county on their investment, construction, water use, demand on the grid and for gas, and employment. In return the county agreed to speed its reviews of the project and not to withhold approvals unreasonably. Negotiations continue before the further readings, and a separate lawsuit by residents asks whether the project should have been reviewed as a major development.

The median price of new houses sold in the United States, October 2024 to July 2026. It fell to $393,300 in the quarter beginning July, from $413,500 the quarter before.

Chart by the Intelligencer from figures by the Census Bureau, via FRED

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Oct. 28. Meritage Homes, a home builder whose eastern region includes both Carolinas, said on Wednesday that it took orders for 3,083 houses in the third quarter, 15 per cent fewer than a year earlier. Revenue from the houses it closed fell 17 per cent to $1.16 billion, and earnings fell 25 per cent to $1.04 a share. Steven J. Hilton, the executive chairman, pointed to "rising mortgage interest rates and persistent geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty."

Meritage said it made greater use of incentives, including rate buy-downs, and that cost shows in its figures: the average house it closed sold for $365,000, down from $380,000, and its gross margin on those sales narrowed to 17.4 per cent from 19.1. The company ended the quarter selling in 348 communities, 4 per cent more than a year before, and the pace of sales in each community fell 21 per cent.

NEW YORK, Oct. 28. Alphabet's shares fell about 8 per cent in late trading on Wednesday after it reported capital spending of $51.4 billion for the quarter, more than double a year earlier, while Microsoft's rose about 5 per cent after it spent less than analysts had expected.

What a 10-year Treasury returned a year, on average, in each decade since the 1930s, in dollars and after the change in consumer prices. The 2020s run through 2025.

Chart by the Intelligencer from figures by Aswath Damodaran of NYU Stern and the Bureau of Labor Statistics

A chart going around X this week carries the headline "The safest asset on Earth just had its worst decade since the Great Depression." It shows Treasury returns decade by decade since the 1930s, and this one, so far, is in the red.

My parents lived through the bank failures of the early 1930s, so I looked at the Depression row first. It's one of the best on the chart. A 10-year Treasury returned about 4 per cent a year through the 1930s, more than in the 1940s, the 1950s or the 1960s. This decade is the worst on the chart, and the Depression was a fine time to own a Treasury.

The reason is what the chart leaves out: prices. Between 1929 and 1933 the cost of living fell by about a quarter. A bond pays a fixed number of dollars, so every year those dollars bought more. By Aswath Damodaran's figures at New York University, $100 put into 10-year Treasuries at the start of 1930 had grown to about $147 by the end of 1939, and that $147 bought what $181 had bought in 1929.

The people it ruined were on the other side of the loan. Irving Fisher, the Yale economist, put it in one line in 1933: "The more the debtors pay, the more they owe." A man with a mortgage owed the same dollars every year, and every year they were harder to earn.

This decade ran the other way. In August 2020 the 10-year Treasury paid about half of one per cent. Then prices rose 9.1 per cent in the year to June 2022, the most in four decades, and interest rates followed them up. A hundred dollars put into the same bonds at the start of 2020 was worth about $97 at the end of last year, and it bought what $77 had bought in 2019. The chart on X, which counts this year too, puts the loss at about 1 per cent a year.

This time the borrower came out ahead. Anyone who took out a 30-year mortgage in January 2021, when Freddie Mac's average rate fell to a record 2.65 per cent, has spent nearly six years paying it back in dollars that buy less every year, at a rate well under the 4.67 per cent the government paid on Wednesday to borrow for two years.

So I'd write the headline differently. The safest asset on Earth paid every dollar it owed in this decade. What changed, in the 1930s and again now, was what a dollar would buy, and that decides whether the lender or the borrower comes out ahead. Proverbs says "the borrower is servant to the lender." For a few years, the dollar arranged it the other way round.

Dear Editor: I read that beginning in 2027 the Federal Reserve will give one of its eight meetings each year to strategy alone, with no vote on rates and no statement afterward. I served twenty-two years on the finance committee of my church, and we held a meeting of that kind every month. We did not think to announce it, because nobody would have believed we had meant to. [The difference, sir, is that the Fed will publish the date in advance, which is more than your committee ever risked. ED.]

A Retired Treasurer, Crescent Avenue.

The National Weather Service forecasts a mostly sunny Thursday in Greenville with a high near 75 and a light north northeast wind, a mostly clear night falling to about 52, and a mostly sunny Friday near 79.