Archive for February, 2010

Not just a big snow storm provided gloom at the end of the week. The report on existing home sales was miserable, and even the revision upward to fourth quarter GDP failed to lift the mood; it simply confirmed that growth still depends on one time efforts and is not yet strongly sustainable.
The National association… »

Durable Goods Orders:
On the surface this morning’s durable goods orders report is a good one: they rose 3.0% in January, which is a much better performance than most folks had expected.
However, when we dig beneath the surface the story is reversed quite dramatically. If we exclude aircraft orders, which shot up over 15%, everything else… »

Hot after yesterday’s report on the ongoing weakness in home prices comes today’s shocking report on the sales of new homes. Just as was the case with the price data there is no way we can put a pleasant gloss on the sales news. It stinks.
Sales of new homes actually dropped in January to a… »

To add to today’s gloom is the Case-Schiller report on home prices, which fell in 0.2% December. While that decline is much smaller than those of the months back in the depth of the crisis, it represents a give-back of the strengthening we had seen at the end of last summer. It confirms the thought… »

There is no way to spin today’s consumer confidence report and make it glow. It is flat out rotten. Just a month after turning up nicely and leading us all to believe consumers had started to feel a little better, the bottom fell out.
The Conference Board survey usually bounces around with a score in the… »

No sooner do I finish my earlier post than I read Paul Krugman’s take on the Republican position on the budget. I think he nails it.
The issue seems simple: having bashed away at government for the best part of three decades the GOP is now reaching the point of no return: the federal deficit needs… »

With the economy stuck firmly in its jobless trajectory, and with the Senate obdurately refusing to do anything at all, we shift our attention this week back to health care reform. After all the fuss in the wake of the Massachusetts election health care reform was presumed to have died, at least in its then… »