Tag Archives: housing

Stocks have stumbled into October with the S&P 500 down about 6% as I write this. The source of equity investors’ angst is always hard to pinpoint and this is no exception but this correction doesn’t seem to be due to concerns about economic growth. At least not directly. The most common explanation for the pullback in stocks – 6% doesn’t even qualify as a correction – is rising interest rates but I think it is a...

The economy ended 2017 with current growth just slightly above trend. In general the reports of the last two weeks of the year were pretty good with housing a standout performer going into the new year. We are still trying to get past the impact – positive and negative – from the hurricanes a few months ago though so it is probably prudent to wait for more evidence before making any definitive pronouncements about the...

The National Association of Realtor (NAR) reports today that sales of existing homes in the US were down 1.7% in August 2017 from July. At a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 5.35 million, that’s the lowest pace for resales since July 2016. It is yet another data point reflecting the almost certain end of “reflation” in the economic sense. US Existing Home Sales, Jan 2011 - Jul 2017(see more posts on U.S. Existing...

Of the economic releases of the past two weeks the one that got the most attention was the employment report. That report is seen by many market analysts as one of the most important and of course the Fed puts a lot of emphasis on it so the press spends an inordinate amount of time dissecting it. I don’t waste much time on it myself because it is subject to large revisions and has little predictive capability. In...

The economic data releases since the last update were generally upbeat but markets are forward looking and the future apparently isn’t to their liking. Of course, it is hard to tell sometimes whether bonds, the dollar and stocks are responding to the real economy or the one people hope Donald Trump can deliver when he isn’t busy contradicting his communications staff. Politics has been front and center recently but...

Economic Reports Scorecard The economic data since my last update has improved somewhat. It isn’t across the board and it isn’t huge but it must be acknowledged. As usual though there are positives and negatives, just with a slight emphasis on positive right now. Interestingly, the bond market has not responded to these slightly more positive readings with nominal and real yields almost exactly where they were in the...

On VoxEU, Gianni La Cava summarizes his research on the secular rise in the housing share of US income. In the US national accounts, income accruing to the housing sector is measured as ‘net housing capital income’, or simply, net rental income (i.e. gross rents less housing costs, such as depreciation and property taxes). This measure includes rental income going to both owner-occupiers (imputed rent) and landlords (market rent). The very detailed nature of the Bureau of Economic...

Norway Real House Price Per M2 We have all heard the incredible stories of housing riches in commodity producing hotspots such as Western Australia and Canada. People have become millionaires simply by leveraging up and holding on to properties. These are the beneficiaries of a global money-printing spree that pre-dates the financial crisis by decades. The road toward such outsized gains in property is not paved...

Is the U.S. housing recovery still on firm footing? Your view on that will depend on which indicators you choose to believe. For the optimists: New home sales spiked 16.6 percent to 619,000 in April, the highest level recorded since early 2008, while the latest data from the Case-Shiller 20-City Composite Home Price Index shows that prices are 5.4 percent higher in the country’s major cities than they were a year ago. And for the pessimists: April housing starts, though up 6.6 percent...