The Mid-Day Update is a five-day-a-week podcast from the Marketplace Morning Report co-hosted by Bill Radke and Steve Chiotakis that wraps up the morning news in a fun little package. Listen here every day at 10 a.m. PT or download it to your iPod by subscribing to the Morning Report Podcast:
From the Marketplace world headquarters in Los Angeles, this is Bill Radke. The Business Roundtable survey shows the number of CEOs planning to add jobs is at the highest level since mid-2007: 39 percent of chief executives expect to boost payrolls in the second half of 2010.
Meanwhile, a little recovery in auto sales: the used car dealership chain CarMax says net income more than tripled in the fiscal first quarter.
Today, billionaire investor George Soros said Germany’s budget austerity risks destroying the European project and collapsing the euro.
New home sales for May were expected to be bad and they were worse — a record 32.7 percent drop to a 300,000 unit annual rate. Incredibly, that’s the lowest number of new home sales in a month since record keeping started in 1963. So much for those last two months of gains — those look artificially pumped up by the government’s expired buying-incentive tax credit.
The investment management firm MacroMarkets reports a majority of the housing analysts they survey every month expects home prices will continue to decline this year by 1.5 percent. The Mortgage Bankers Association is more pessimistic; they think the fall will be twice that. That group also says the number of people seeking mortgages fell about 6 percent from its six-month high last week.
The Federal Reserve meeting ends today — and they’re expected to keep sitting on interest rates.
European governments’ plan to levy a new tax on banks could pressure the U.S. to do the same — or make it easier for the U.S. to do it, since the others are, or give, the U.S. an opportunity to not do it and steal bank business from Europe.
The Louisiana judge who struck down the Obama administration’s six-month ban on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has reported extensive investments in the oil and gas industry, according to financial disclosure reports. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean it biased his ruling.
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