Housing starts surged 19.4 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.739 million units last month, the highest level since June 2006. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast that starts would rise to a rate of 1.613 million units in March.
Starts soared 37 percent on a year-over-year basis in March. Home building slumped in February as large parts of the country reeled from unseasonably cold weather, including winter storms in Texas and other parts of the densely populated South.
Groundbreaking activity increased in the Northeast, Midwest and South, but fell in the West. Permits for future home building rose 2.7 percent to a rate of 1.766 million units last month, recouping only a fraction of February’s 8.8 percent plunge. They jumped 30.2 percent compared with March 2020.
GM, LG plan second U.S. battery cell plant
General Motors and South Korean joint-venture partner LG Energy Solution on Friday said they would build a second U.S. battery cell manufacturing plant, revealing plans for a $2.3 billion factory in Spring Hill, Tenn.
The 2.8 million-square-foot plant, scheduled to open in late 2023, will employ 1,300 people and is expected to have a production capacity of about 35 gigawatt-hours — similar to the companies’ Ultium Cells joint-venture plant in Lordstown, Ohio — as they move to respond to the growing demand in the electric-vehicle market.
“The addition of our second all-new Ultium battery cell plant in the U.S. with our joint venture partner LG Energy Solution is another major step in our transition to an all-electric future,” GM Chief Executive Mary Barra said in a statement.
LG Chem said in a regulatory filing that its LG Energy Solution unit will invest $933.5 million in the plant between this year and 2023.
Most battery manufacturing is currently concentrated in China and Korea, while Tesla and Japanese partner Panasonic largely control most U.S. battery production.
When it opens, the new GM-LG battery plant will supply batteries for the electric Cadillac Lyriq crossover that GM is slated to start building at its nearby Spring Hill assembly plant next year. LG is expected to supply the batteries from Korea until then.
GM said in October that it would invest $2 billion in Spring Hill to build electric vehicles.
U.S. publicly listed companies more than quadrupled the appointment of Latino executives to their boards in the first quarter, a small step toward addressing ethnic and racial inequality in the top corporate ranks. About 82 Latinos joined the boards of public companies between January and March, up from the 19 appointments in the same period a year ago, according to data from the Latino Corporate Directors Association released Friday. As many as 33 of those individuals are serving on a board for the first time. U.S. states and organizations have been pushing hard to force big companies to improve diversity in the workplace, particularly on boards.
Morgan Stanley reported a 150 percent rise in first-quarter profit Friday that sailed past Wall Street expectations, while disclosing an almost $1 billion loss from the collapse of private fund Archegos. The Wall Street powerhouse said in a statement that the one-off losses were related to a credit event and subsequent losses from “a single prime brokerage client” that it identified as Archegos on a call with analysts. Morgan Stanley was one of six banks that had exposure to Archegos Capital Management, a family office fund that defaulted on margin calls late last month and triggered a fire sale of stocks across Wall Street.
