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Up and Down We Go

As if right on cue today’s news encapsulates everything we’ve been talking about all week: despite all the brouhaha about recovery our progress is precarious. First: durable goods orders. Today’s report is bad news. Durable goods orders fell at a 2.4% rate in August. That’s the second drop in the last three months, but follows […]

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Unemployment Muddle Too

Not only is the housing market a mess to interpret, so too is the job market. Today’s weekly report on initial unemployment insurance claims showed a good drop: the week ended September 19th had 21,000 fewer such claims than the week before. The problem is that the overall figure is stuck above half a million […]

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Housing Muddle

I commented just two days ago about the state of the housing market. The data that prompted me then was the release of home price trends by the Federal Housing Finance Authority – prices have risen very slightly over a period of a few months which suggests that the market has hit bottom. But today […]

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