Hello my friends, today is July 6 and this is Markets Weekly. So this past week we had a shortened holiday week due to the 4th of July, but when markets are trading they were basically going up and we closed the week at new all-time highs. Today I want to talk about three things. First, I want to talk about why I'm very cautious on the stock market right now, despite being on team crash up. Secondly, I think the big news that has week was all political news and that's really important because remember markets are downstream from politics.
So let's talk about how it seems that the establishment is collapsing across the western world. And lastly, let's talk a little bit about the housing market because there are more more signs that the housing market is definitely slowing but no sign of a collapse. Okay, starting with the stock market. So when I look at the stock market, it looks like this in P500 and the NASDAQ are going to the moon, going up every single day and you know some might even say that they are going parabolic. Now when I see this, this is very concerning to me because it tells me there's a lot of speculation and a lot of leverage in the market and anecdotally I get the sense that there are more and more retail involvement in the market and leverage today is not margin debt which is what it used to be.
Leverage today is options, specifically co-options and as we all know there's a lot of co-options activity in the market. Now this sets up for a market that's very fragile because you have a lot of people on one side of the boats, all highly levered. A slight you know setback, a slight external shock could really have a downward cascading effect in this context and this is something that we see over and over again throughout history across the world. So I'm very positive on a stock market as you guys all know I'm on team crash shop and I think that we are going to go higher than anyone expects.
I've been telling everyone that for several months but that just doesn't mean going up every single day. If we keep going up like this we have a high risk that we could overheat and then have a downward cascade where the correction goes further than you would expect and longer than you would expect. So I think the best scenario for the market right now is if we pull off a bit, pull back a bit, consolidate and then we can go back up again. But right now I don't like what I'm seeing. Now just looking across the world, let's say looking at Euroland over the past few years we had a global equity market rally.
We went up, they went up and right now over the past few months if you look at the stock market indexes in the UK and France and Germany they've basically been to consolidating over the past few months. If you want to look at other indicators of risk sentiment let's look at crypto. Now Bitcoin had a really bad week but if you look at the altcoins they are having an even worse week. Now over the past few years I've noticed that a crypto seems to be the most sensitive risk on asset and it's not been doing very well. Now looking at the news the past week it looks like the biggest bear on Wall Street, JPMorgan's Marco is leaving the firm.
There are no more bears on Wall Street. So again I'm looking at this totality of it and I'm getting the sense that we are probably at some kind of close to some kind of tipping point where we're probably going to get some kind of correction. I've been saying this for a couple of weeks, been totally wrong but I'm sticking to this. So again I'm very cautious on the market right now. I'm seeing a bit too much euphoria. All right now the second thing I want to talk about is the big political developments we've seen the past week. Again this is really important because the government is the most important actor in the economy in the markets.
What fiscal policy does, what monetary policy does in my view though these are the most important factors that shape price action. So last week we talked about how Biden's poor performance at the debate shifted the odds in favor of a Trump presidency and so many Trump trades were running. We saw prison stocks surge, we saw long-related interest rates go up a bit. Now this past week we had some new developments on the political front. Right now the markets are actually thinking that it's more likely that the Democratic Party nominee will be Kamala Harris instead of President Biden.
And interestingly despite this pretty big development markets are still pricing in about a 60% chance of a Trump victory this November. So it doesn't seem to have a big market impact so far but I'm getting the sense that the market is probably a bit too complacent about a Trump victory because there's a good chance that maybe Vice President Harris just won't be the nominee and if we have other people emerge say aggression Whitmore or Gavin Newsom I think the odds become a lot less difficult to place going into November. Now at the moment President Biden is still quite. adamant that he will not leave. He is going to be the nominee but we also see forces gathering within the Democratic Party that are trying to push him out. Notably very big name donors are saying that they don't want to donate to President Biden thinking that it's a lost cause again without money it's very hard to run a campaign and you also have Democrats within Congress trying to push President Biden out. Like we mentioned last week politics is a team sport if you have an unpopular president at the top of the ticket everyone down ticket is going to suffer so a lot of these guys are thinking that well if Biden's going to be the nominee it's going to impact my chances of getting elected in the house or in the Senate and so they they don't like that. So and I think the betting markets are right that President Biden will not be the nominee but beyond that I think we're going to begin for a few more weeks of turmoil it's going to be very exciting and I think that it's a risk factor for the markets in the US.
But I think the big election the past week was what happened in the UK. What we're seeing is the complete complete destruction of the Tory which is the right-leaning party in the UK. They absolutely got slipped out of office so right now we're seeing the Labour Party which is the more left-leaning party in the UK take a majority in their legislator which is going to give them a lot of power to carry out their agenda. Now markets are actually pretty complacent about this part of it was probably because it was expected but also part of it is that you know the the vision between the Tories and the Labour are not as polarised as they are and say in France or in the US. Now the big problems confronting the the UK government of course like everywhere else in the world inflation people are unhappy that their living standards are declining they're unhappy about social services for example health care in the US UK you famously have to wait a long time before being able to see a doctor and of course migration has surged in the UK like it has in many other countries and a lot of people are feeling uneasy about this and it's trading social services as well.
Now Labour well it's going to have a they're going to have a lot of challenges they have to confront what they do seem to be very clear about is they want to build a lot more houses to alleviate the housing shortage and so that seems to be very friendly to home builder stocks in the UK. But of course the big big big news of course in the Europe is the upcoming French elections tomorrow Sunday like we discussed last week there is very there was a chance well there still is a chance of just the rise to power of the right leaning a resamme lemong nationale which has a very different vision for for France. But political developments over the past week have made resamme lemonge nationale majority much less likely in in France and so I think that's calmed markets a bit.
So so let's have a little bit of an overview about how this election process works. First of course in France you have two rounds of elections first round and then you have a legislator first round election a lot of people run and then you have a second round where you have basically have a runoff. But in the event that a third party also did very well in the first round you could still have a three-way election on the second round. Now what happened the past week was that the left-leaning party in Nubo from Palpelaire and the more centrist party and Macron's party basically got together and they are trying to push out the right-leaning party by saying hey if there's an election where either the from Palpelaire is third or Macron's party is third place we're just going to bow out and we're going to tell our members to vote against the resamme lemonge nationale.
So if you look at the data you can see that for a lot of these districts the for for a lot of these districts where the resamme lemonge nationale had a plurality of the votes the second and third place votes were were not that far behind but when you combine them together the second and third place runner-ups so basically people who belong to either the left-leaning party or the center party together is enough to push or it's enough to push out the first place winning rosam lemonge nationale candidate. Now if their plan works then that really makes it very difficult for the right-leaning party to gain a majority control in a legislator and thus form a government and push through their agenda.
Now polling seems to suggest that it's very very unlikely for the right-leaning party to gain power and so it seems like the most likely outcome tomorrow, Sunday, is that you are going to have a fragmented legislator which means that nothing gets done and I guess it's more market-friendly as and there's less huge deficit spending, less big changes in the legislative agenda but again this is highly uncertain and there's going to be a lot of strategic voting it's easy to see how left-leaning parties can band together to defeat right-leaning parties but I think it's a little bit less certain whether or not the center will actually go and vote for the left instead of for the right I think some people in the center are very uneasy with the economic policies of the left-leaning parties over there but so far markets are I think have taken comfort into the reduced probability of the big change in direction of the legislator where you would which was what you would see if the the resolvable national rose to power so let's see what happens on Sunday again tail risks are diminished but we can always have a surprise polling is difficult for the second round okay the last thing that I want to talk about is what we seem to be seeing is a slowing housing market
Now housing has been super resilient all throughout this rate hiking cycle many people thought that the future would look like the past again we had a housing crash in 2008 many people thought that when mortgage rates went to 7% and they've been at 7% for some time that housing market will completely tank that did not happen at all in fact housing prices gradually rose but now we're seeing some definite softness in the housing market first let's look at the upcoming supply for houses now the leading indicator for this was single housing building permits construction starts and you're seeing that indeed there has been a significant drop-off in applications to build new single-family homes again that's a strong sign that housing activity is slowing now the reason for this seems to be that the builders have just an enormous inventory of new homes that they're trying to sell now new home inventories are at levels on last scene since a pre-grade financial crisis pre-2008 so it seems to be that builders saw that they were having a tremendous demand for their product built a lot but have been having trouble selling them possibly to be due to higher mortgage rates impacting affordability and so they're just kind of slowing down since they have a lot of inventory and that seems to be causing some anecdotal softness in prices and looking around I'm hearing more and more that at least at the very least prices are not going up for new construction and in some places they're declining a bit
now of course housing is very local nationally we still see home prices continue to rise but it does seem that they are softening a bit in addition to this again supply and demand looking at the demand side we do we still have very high mortgage rates but we also have very softening of the labor market now over the past few months the unemployment rate has steadily ticked up ticked up again this past month about 4.1 percent and in line with the softening labor market we also see wages decelerating now wage growth is still very healthy but it's been decelerating for months and as people have slower wage gains as mortgage rates remain very high naturally they're not going to be able to afford housing very high house prices and so what seems to be happening is that the builders are meeting them with a slightly lower or at least second home prices now this doesn't mean that the builders are not doing well when you look at the earnings reports of the builders well there still have very high margins looking at kb homes for example which is a builder for i guess the lower side part of the market their margins have surged over the past several years now they don't seem to be in distress at all what seems to be is that they have somewhat some degree of pricing power so rather than just keep increasing the supply of homes and just take market share they're happy with their position now if you look at the home builder stocks they surged the past few months they've been coming down a bit but they're still quite high so it doesn't seem like there's any sign of a crash no signs of distress from the major builders and again looking at home buyers whereas there's an affordability issue and unemployment still remains strong so it seems like the housing market is set to correct sideways over the coming months and if we do have let's say for whatever reason rates come down a bit in part due to fed cuts or maybe a more concern of a global economic slowdown you can see those market rates come down to a six-hando and maybe that would be supportive of things as well again the future is not always like the past there's no indication of a housing market crash but what we do see though is a lot of softening in the housing market that would be good for people looking to buy a new home
all right so that's all i prepared for this week again not much happening the past week and if you're interested in hearing more about my thoughts check out my blog at fedguy.com and if you're interested in learning more about how markets work check out my courses at centralbaking101.com talk to you all next week