“We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.” — Warren Buffett

1. Retail Sales Rose in June as Inflation Eased — Retail sales—a measure of spending at stores, online and in restaurants—rose a seasonally adjusted 0.2% last month from the month before, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. That was a slower pace than in May and April and matched the 0.2% increase in consumer prices last month, a sign that Americans’ spending is keeping up with, but not outpacing, inflation. In June, shoppers picked up their spending on furniture, electronics and online shopping. Sales at grocery stores, gasoline stations, hardware and sporting goods stores dropped. Dining out at bars and restaurants was broadly flat.
2. High Rates, Low Supply Hinder Home Buying This Summer — Elevated mortgage rates resulting from the Federal Reserve’s actions since early last year are keeping many buyers out of the market and reducing demand. At the same time, the rates are discouraging homeowners from selling, limiting the supply of homes for sale. Existing home sales, which make up most of the housing market, decreased 3.3% in June from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.16 million, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday. That was the slowest sales pace since January. June sales fell 18.9% from a year earlier.
3. White House Says Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft Agree to AI Safeguards — the White House said seven major AI companies—Amazon.com AMZN 0.03%increase; green up pointing triangle, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta Platforms META -2.73%decrease; red down pointing triangle, Microsoft MSFT -0.89%decrease; red down pointing triangle and OpenAI—are making voluntary commitments that also include testing their AI systems’ security and capabilities before their public release, investing in research on the technology’s risks to society, and facilitating external audits of vulnerabilities in their systems. Before OpenAI launched its GPT-4 model in late March, the company spent roughly six months working with external experts who tried to provoke it to produce harmful or racist content. Most companies also developing large language models rely heavily on humans who teach these models to be engaging and helpful and avoid generating toxic responses through a process called reinforcement learning with human feedback.

The week ahead — Economic data from Econoday.com:

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