It is January 2022 and we are trying to figure out where we go from here. To find some clues, we took a look at some key words in google trends to try to find out what’s on peoples minds. Lets take a look.
Key word: Inflation. Our first google trend search was for inflation with a period of 5 years. As you can see from the chart below over the past five years the google search for ‘inflation’ was relatively stable up until mid-year 2021 and it has had a resurgence recently.
Key word: Eviction. We expected to see an uptick in google search for ‘eviction’ since almost all the moratoriums are over and people can be evicted but the results surprised us. Evidently very few are searching ‘eviction’ however people were very interested in the middle of 2021.
Key Word: Debt. Another surprising finding, people didn’t seem to be concerned with ‘debt’ past January 2020 although the new year has brought an uptick in search for the word.
Key word: Mortgage. Clues for what’s happening with the real estate market can be found by looking at google trends for key word ‘mortgage’ and this doesn’t bode well for the real estate market. People have seem to lost interest in searching for mortgages.
Key word: Stock trading. If declines in ‘mortgage’ google search is an indication that the real estate market will trend down then the same must hold for ‘stock trading’ as the decline in that key word has been trending down for the past year.
Key word: Resume. Lastly, after searching inflation, eviction, debt, mortgage and stock trading we searched for ‘resume’ to see if people are interested in returning back to work. In the past month, there does appear to be an uptick in people searching ‘resume’ but the trend if far below the past 5 year average. We will have to wait and see if there is a trend up but for now it seems fairly weak so we assume that updating resumes is not a high priority for most people across America.
To summarize, we have down trends in mortgages and stock trading and we have major upticks in inflation with slow but climbing concerns over resume, debt and eviction. If we had to put money on these trends we would short stocks and real estate and be very concerned about a recession but we’ll need to look a further economic data over the next quarter.
Stay tuned and stay solvent…