Breitbart Business Digest: Musk Gets What He Wants (Attention) While Mortgage Rates Soar

Only a couple pieces of major economic data were reported Monday, which gave the financial media a chance to spend a lot of time chattering about Elon Musk and his manipulations.

It emerged on Sunday that the pro-China tech mogul declined an invitation to join the Twitter board. Musk’s super-fans speculated that this is because he’s planning a hostile takeover of the social media platform. Elon-skeptics, however, noted the victory-lap-like statement from Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal which specified that the board seat was “contingent on a background check.” No one other than Musk truly knows why he didn’t join the board, but it is clear that Musk knows what he wants (attention and money) and is getting more of it every day. Though it would be delicious to see the wokesters at Twitter get put in their place, we remain skeptical until Musk makes a bigger move. It would only cost him about another $15 billion.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s Shanghai factory (of course Musk has a Shanghai factory) has been shuttered due to severe COVID lockdowns imposed on the city by the Chinese Communist Party, and there is no sign that it will be open for many weeks. The lockdown/COVID fear has also made it back stateside, where Philadelphia has reimposed mask mandates. Dr. Fauci has suggested for weeks that Americans should brace to lose more freedoms; don’t be surprised if he gets his way.

Thirty-year fixed mortgage rates ballooned to well over five percent (they were recently below three percent), the highest in 13 years, according to the National Association of Realtors. While everyone saw this coming, it is shocking to read this figure nonetheless. House affordability already nosedived during the pandemic, when people fled city apartments and tried to get in on the home-ownership gold rush. Now with rates rising for the foreseeable future, many Americans are priced out of the housing market.

If all of this sounds gloomy, you’re not alone. Consumer inflation expectations are over 6.5 percent, which is easily a record. Americans believe that virtually everything is going to get more expensive, and they are not expecting significant wage growth.

Meanwhile, the White House again blamed pain at the pump on Vladimir Putin and greedy oil executives.