$40,000,000,000,000, New homes, Old homes, Headlines and Who was Noel Hord?
This Week…
$40,000,000,000,000 is the national debt number.
That’s $40 trillion if you can’t track the 0s.
That’s a lot of money, and the United States owes it to the people that lent it to us, which is pretty much everyone: countries, states, cities, funds, and you and me included.
So, what is this $40 trillion? (I’m not typing out a bunch of 0s).
They are short-, medium-, and long-term United States Treasury bills, notes, and bonds. The U.S. Treasury issues them, and the market buys them, determining the rate, or yield, paid to the holder of the bill, note, or bond. They are considered a safe investment.
When a bond is purchased, the buyer gives the money to the U.S. Treasury, and in turn, they receive a piece of paper (or emailed PDF) stating that the buyer is owed money by the United States. It’s a loan to the U.S. Government.
This past week, the 30-year bond went for the highest yield in 30 years: 5.44%.
And the 10-year was at 4.74%.
I’ll have more comments below.
Let’s talk housing...
Housing starts fell sharply in July, down 13.5% from the same month in 2025 and down 12.4% from the previous month.
No one saw that coming except… for a builder friend of mine who does a lot of work for the major home builders. He said that things have slowed dramatically.
Oddly enough, building permits are up 5% over the previous month.
But… housing completions are down 9.1% from the previous month and 16.8% from the previous year.
Oddly enough, the National Association of Home Builders showed that home builder sentiment remains weak.
That’s what high interest rates will do. Well, high relative to the last five years.
Finally, the pending home sales index fell 2.3%. Not a surprise given the previous bullet points, but economists had expected an increase of 0.1%.
Headlines
Once on the Brink, U.S. Steel’s Oldest Plant Gets a New Life
Two years ago, U.S. Steel couldn’t afford to keep operating its Pittsburgh plant.
Fast forward, and new owner Nippon Steel is planning to keep that plant going for decades longer.
It’s putting over $2,000,000,000 into the plant and is expected to generate up to 6,000 jobs.
And the U.S company is still called U.S. Steel. I mean, you have heard of the Pittsburgh Steelers, haven’t you?
U.S. Steel has been in Pittsburgh for 125 years, and the plant has been in the area since 1938.
Driverless Trucks Are Here, Hauling Doritos
PepsiCo is running 35 driverless trucks on Arizona roads. The trucking union is NOT happy. They want a fully trained driver behind the wheel.
Ooookay. It’s just that these are all two-axle box trucks that anyone with a driver’s license can drive. I guess that makes me a fully trained driver.
The bonus? The sales rep, who is usually driving the truck, now has more time to be at the retail location to schmooze with the store owner or management until the truck gets there. He then unloads the product.
And there is no one in the box truck texting and driving. That works for me.
For the trucks that go from warehouse to warehouse, all they need to stop for is to recharge. No trucking labor and wage rules to bump up against.
Companies Have Rarely Had Such Great Expectations
The Surprise Ratio is going up and up. So? What is a Surprise Ratio?
It’s not a Gomer Pyle, USMC thing. It’s a Wall Street thing.
Throughout the year, publicly held companies like the ones in your IRA or 401k give guidance to stock analysts as to what the earnings expectations should be. If the company can hit the forecasted numbers, that’s good. When they exceed the forecasts, that’s a surprise. A pleasant one.
This past quarter, the share of companies exceeding analyst expectations are near historic highs.
This has impacted many stock prices in a good way, which can be seen in your 401k statement.
Cross fingers that this keeps going on.
Who was Noel Hord?
He was in the inaugural class of Baby Boomers – he was born in 1946, the 4th of five children.
His father was a pastor and carpenter, and his mother returned to college in her 40s and became a librarian.
After raising five kids, she needed the peace and quiet.
He attended a newly desegregated high school and was friendly with students of all colors.
Noel met his wife at his father’s church and married in 1966.
That’s right about the time he dropped out of Indiana State University, going to work at a shoe store in his hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana.
It seems he liked playing cards with his buddies more than cracking books.
He started as a stock assistant before moving into sales.
He was the first black salesperson in Terre Haute, and his charm and social skills made him a natural.
Mr. Hord: “There was the people side of it, and…it was commission driven, and you could impact your own paycheck.”
He even hoped one day to run a shoe store.
In the late 60s, he was promoted to a management trainee position in Bown Shoe’s Wohl division.
Over the next 15 years, he went on to other retail management jobs, including overseeing shoe sales at the J.L. Hudson in Detroit.
A little-known fact - except for those from Detroit - that store had over 2,000,000 square feet of floor space and was the third largest department store in the world. And you thought Costco stores were big.
In 1984, he joined the Fisher Camuto Group, which later became Nine West, as a division president.
In 1993, he joined U.S. Shoe’s footwear operation, and two years later U.S. Shoe was acquired by Nine West.
He became President and CEO of the combined company.
Footwear News named him Man of the Year in 1994.
Noel Hord died earlier this year in Hacienda Heights, California.
After leaving Nine West, he created the Hord Foundation to fund scholarships for minority students and was a leader of Concerned Black Men, a nonprofit providing scholarships and mentoring.
“Even though I was a person of color at a time segregation was going on, I never put barriers or lines around what I wanted to do. I knew, in terms of performance, that I had to stand out.”Now that’s a salesman.
$40,000,000,000,000. That number is just a milestone, another marker on the accumulated debt chart (not to be confused with the depth chart of your fantasy football team). It’s a lot, and the problem is that Washington will not be reducing that number, now or later. The good news is that the world's major economies aren’t in any better shape. Like the U.S., the members of the European Union keep funding social programs. The U.K. will never be a global currency, and China is out because its long-term prospects are weak at best – its population has already dropped by 14,000,000 people in the last few years, and nobody is going to be buying yuan as a ‘safe currency’ when the country is already shrinking. Maybe if they were backed by the financial might of Iran, Russia, and North Korea. Oh wait, China is backing them using smoke and mirrors. While India is a phenomenal producer of goods, I don’t know enough about it economically to judge one way or the other if the Rupee can be a safe haven currency. But I’m thinking not.
At some time, we must stop spending more than we bring in. I’m guessing that will happen in 2033 when Social Security benefits are reduced for recipients. Because Hell hath no fury like a Boomer scorned.
