From the monthly archives:
The Mortgage Bankers Association’s figures on home loan performance just keep getting worse and worse. Here is what things looked like in Q3 2009:
* The overall mortgage delinquency rate surged to 9.64% in Q3 2009 from 9.24% in Q2 2009 and 6.99% a year earlier. Once again, this is a fresh record high for the [...]
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We just got the latest data on housing construction activity. Here’s a recap:
* Overall housing starts plunged 10.6% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 529,000 in October from 592,000 in September. That was much worse than the 600,000 units that economists were expecting. Building permit activity was also weak. Permitting activity dropped 4% to [...]
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The National Association of Home Builders just released its latest builder sentiment index. The reading came in at 17. That was unchanged from a downwardly revised 17 in October and slightly below the 19 number economists were expecting.
Among the sub-indices, the one measuring present single family sales was unchanged at 17. The prospective buyer traffic [...]
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Holy cow! That didn’t last long. Look at this intraday chart of the Dollar Index. If that’s all the bang Bernanke can get for his … er … buck, the dollar is sicker than even I thought (and that’s saying something)!
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The text from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s speech in New York was just released. For a change, he actually mentioned the dollar and suggested that its movements could factor into policy decisions. That has led to a bounce in the Dollar Index from its daily low. The operative text is below:
“The foreign exchange value of [...]
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There’s a lot of chatter on the dollar front today. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told a group of Japanese reporters that he “believe[s] deeply that it’s very important for the U.S. and the economic health of the U.S. that we maintain a strong dollar.”
The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum is also up in arms about the [...]
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I’m sorry, I can’t make it any more plain than that. To argue that financial bubbles aren’t dangerous, and that the Fed shouldn’t try to combat them — which is what ex-Fed governor Frederic Mishkin just did in the Financial Times — is monumentally stupid. Can this guy be serious? Haven’t we seen what a [...]
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The October jobs report was just released. It showed the economy losing 190,000 jobs last month, slightly worse than the -175,000 forecast. However, September’s job loss was revised to only -219,000 from -263,000, while August’s reading also improved to -154,000 from -201,000.
The unemployment rate spiked to 10.2% from 9.8%, well above the 9.9% forecast of [...]
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The Federal Open Market Committee just released its latest interest rate decision and statement. Rates were left unchanged, as expected, at a range of 0% to 0.25%. The Fed also held onto its language pledging to keep rates low for an “extended period.” One minor surprise: The Fed said it would reduce the size of [...]
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That was interesting. CNBC just carried a report from Steve Liesman , the gist of which was (in my humble opinion) “Go ahead … sell the dollar!” Specifically, Liesman said that unnamed policy officials told him the U.S. government view is that the dollar decline is no big deal. The decline is orderly, it just [...]
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