Forget about AI, New York is worried about rats. As sanitation, health issues in the city rise they have appointed a rat czar Kathleen Korradi to take care of the problem. Hope you took out your trash this week. Just checking.

Home prices are not exactly responding to interest rates, a cyber attack just took down a massive logistics company and Meta has Chinese retailers to thank this quarter. Let’s take a look

The Big Picture

Even with Federal raising interest rates, home prices don’t seem to be too affected. In fact, there was reportedly a 0.2% rise in S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index across the country in February compared to January.

The mortgage rates have declined in December bringing home buyers back to market. The inventory of homes for sale remained low as well, triggering an increase in home prices. The average rate of a 30-year fixed mortgage was 6.39% in the week of April 20. Prices in western markets such as Seattle are declining while several markets in the east are seeing gains year over year. Miami’s annual home price grew the fastest in the country at 10.8%.

Sector Sweep

Technology

• Expeditors international of Washington, a global logistics company closed its operations following a cyber attack last year. They were dealing with a lawsuit from its longtime client iRobot which makes robot vacuums due to delays and lost business.

• Amazon is laying off 9000 employees from it’s cloud computing and human resource groups. CEO Andy Jassy has been aggressively cutting costs as they expect slowing growth in their retail business.

• Chinese retailers spent a considerable amount of money in Facebook ads for customers outside China. Meta released beat their earnings expectations as their ad revenue grew 26% YOY.

Natural resources

• Post the announcement of the Inflation reduction Act, mining companies have racked up to $65 billion in pending and completed deals. This has primarily been driven by the growth of EVs and their infrastructure.

Real Estate

• Hot office markets from Miami to Phoenix, also called sunbelt markets are starting to see slow slowdown in their growth as demand for office space slows down and vacancy rates have begun to rise.

Transportation

• Atlanta based railroad operator Southern Folk stated that the train derailment which caused the toxic chemical spill might cost the company $387 million.

That’s all for today folks. Do keep a lookout for our weekly email about stock deep dives and personal finance strategies this Saturday.

Memes daily

That’s just wrong.

Okay so what are cheap dudes like me supposed to do?