At all times.

Via Newsbusters, something to tide you over on a news day that started out fast and has slowed considerably. Give Harris-Perry credit, at least, for fine-tuning her messaging. You’re not going to sell swing voters on far-left liberalism by telling them their kids don’t really belong to them, but tell them that they have a [...]

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Bypass.

The White House, apparently miffed by the inaugural speech’s general reception as grossly out-of-touch and aggressively liberal, is all set to “pivot” back to jobs and the economy in the president’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night — meaning that we’ll once again have the honor, nay, the privilege to hear all about [...]

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Seasonal volatility or nascent growth?

A few economic indicators out today produced genuine good news, on jobs and the housing market. Have we begun to turn the corner on growth, though, or are we just looking at normal seasonal variations?  It all depends on how one looks at the numbers. Let’s start with the weekly jobless claims, which fell to [...]

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"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

The Obama administration is launching a brand-new public service announcement to tout Treasury and Housing & Urban Development‘s joint initiative to help progress “the Obama Administration’s broad strategy to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, stabilize the country’s housing market, and improve the nation’s economy.” Via Politico: “While communities across the country are beginning to recover from [...]

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Time for another bailout bonanza?

Of President Obama and the Democrats’ many refrains that irk me to no end, the incessant iterations of “we need to further regulate big finance and kill the Bush tax cuts in order to avoid the policies that got us here in the first place” are among the worst. That type of blather conveniently ignores [...]

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Or is it just another mirage?

Four years ago, the housing market collapsed as the artificial bubble in prices and equity popped.  The disaster infected the financial sector, thanks to the aggressive policy supported by two administrations and Congress to spread the risk for subprime and other dicey lending through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities, nearly destroying the Western economy [...]

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More housing-market messes.

I realize I already discussed this moment in an earlier post, but there are just so many juicy ways to interpret it — I hope you’ll forgive me for being unable to resist the temptation to use it just once more. At a campaign event in Ohio last week, President Obama lectured the crowd about [...]

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Market forces.

An interesting if not exactly shocking CNN report this morning shows rents rapidly increasing in large urban areas, driving a national average increase of 5% — at the same time that housing prices continue to fall.  Also not exactly shocking, the largest rent increases have occurred where foreclosure rates are higher.  The rent increases are [...]

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But perhaps a bottom in the housing market.

The news from today’s economic indicators was mostly negative, although one key report may have a silver lining.  CNBC’s Diana Olick reports that the new S&P/Case Shiller report shows that home prices hit a new low in the first quarter, but that signs within the data suggest that we may have finally found a bottom [...]

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But inventory down as well.

The string of bad economic news to close out Q1 continued today with the Census/HUD announcement of new residential sales in March.  The seasonally-adjusted annual rate of sales fell 7.1% from February, although there are a few glimmers of good news in the decline: Sales of new single-family houses in March 2012 were at a [...]

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"Unexpectedly"!

Yesterday, the Census Bureau showed new-housing starts plummeting 5.8% last month from February, which stunned analysts expecting a slight uptick in the series.  Today’s report from the National Association of Realtors shows that it’s not just the new-home market that tanked in March, a result which once again surprised analysts (via Instapundit): Sales of previously [...]

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Manufacturing slows, new-home starts tumble.

The Obama administration got caught flat-footed a couple of weeks ago by an anemic job-creation report for March from the Department of Labor, and it looks as if that was no fluke.  Two more economic indicators over the last 24 hours show at least a slowdown in the US economy — and potentially bad news [...]

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The Dukes of Moral Hazard.

It seems that the White House has tried everything they can to keep housing values from dropping to a historically-rational level.  They have blocked foreclosures, offered gimmicky tax breaks that did nothing but steal demand from future quarters, and spent tens of billions on HAMP.  All of these came from the Obama administration’s emphasis on [...]

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Ah, invincible ignorance.

On Don Imus’ radio program this morning, CNN contributor James Carville boldly proclaimed that no Republican will beat Obama in 2012. He didn’t say, though, that Barack Obama cannot lose. Oh, no. Events could conspire against him: The only way the president will lose according to Carville is if some event takes place and changes [...]

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"Precious few details."

Jim Pethokoukis thinks it might be, but I’m not so sure.  As described by Barack Obama, the program is a significant expansion of a couple of programs that so far had been limited to Fannie/Freddie-backed mortgages.  CNBC explains that the new initiative will now promote refinancing for mortgages no matter if backed by one of [...]

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Mixed signals.

Two economic indicators delivered unexpected results, but in opposite directions.  First, the number of weekly initial jobless claims fell a stunning 50,000 to 352K, the lowest level in almost four years: In the week ending January 14, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 352,000, a decrease of 50,000 from the previous week’s revised figure [...]

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Not your typical dormitory.

Maybe it’s that the Occupy Wall Street protests have reawakened a latent sense of avarice in me. Maybe it’s that Michael Moore’s vacation home makes me believe I need not be super rich to have a huge house. (After all, according to him, he’s not a member of the 1 percent — and he has [...]

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Reaching bottom?

Bloomberg takes a page out of Reuters’ style book by announcing that existing home sales dropped “unexpectedly” by 0.8% in April, but I’m not sure what’s so unexpected about it.  Sales fell in February by 9.6%, rebounded upward by less than half of that amount in March (3.7%), and April’s numbers are just a slight [...]

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Permit applications fall 4%.

The housing market continues to decline sharply, according to the latest figures on new housing starts and residential building permits.  The Census Bureau reported today that the annualized rate of new residential starts dropped over 10 points from March to April, and that single-family starts dropped 5.1%.  Permit applications also declined by 4%, which indicates [...]

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Suckers!

In my analyses of the homebuyer tax credits issued, renewed, and expanded by Democrats in response to the housing market collapse, I called it a waste of taxpayer money that only incentivized those already inclined and qualified to buy, skewed demand, and put off a much-needed correction in pricing.  I left out something that the [...]

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