Below are the National Retail Federation’s results of this first and critical shopping weekend of the holiday season. And for those who want to know the origin of the term Black Friday, see our post from last year, where you will also find a great Seinfeld clip.

Below are some post holiday retail sales results from a Bloomberg report. Now major retailers like WalMart, Gap, and Macy’s are cutting profit forecasts. When Black Friday kicked off the holiday shopping season, we explained that Black Friday is named as such because it starts the season of huge sales that finally bring retailers into [...]

Holiday shopping is looking bleak year-over-year. Deep discounts help but people are sticking to items they need and most sectors in retail are suffering. The three graphs below tell the story. The official numbers for retailers will come out on January 8. This will follow the December jobs report on January 2, which is likely [...]

Made-Off finishes his holiday shopping while his victim list grows larger and more upset.

Fixed and ARM rates for loans up to $625k are holding onto the 0.625% drops we saw last week after the Fed said they’d buy $500b in mortgage bonds, and rates on loans from $625k to $1m are down about 0.125%.

According to an AP headline that was widely picked up across the web, holiday shopping is off to a strong start. But CNBC called it a slow start, Bloomberg said sales were the least since 2005, WSJ said the holiday shopping mood was subdued, and the FT said that Black Friday Sales Suggest Longer Stay [...]

Holiday shopping is always a closely-watched measure of consumer strength, and this year it’s all the more closely scrutinized because of the 18-month long credit crunch finally taking its toll on consumers.

Glad to say that my first WeeklyBasis of 2008 is good news! Fixed and ARM rates are down .375% from pre-holiday levels, and it seems to be sticking because of continued recession signals implicit in recent economic data. The volatility I talked so much about in the 4Q2007 may return and make me eat those [...]

Conforming fixed rates on loans up to $417k open this week down about .375%, and Jumbo rates on loans above $417k are about even (because Jumbos are still pricing slightly more to risk than market levels). This is a good time for borrowers to lock rates and capture lows in a week that may be [...]