By John Richardson
“People are tired of being depressed and looking for any little source of light to feel positive. Even companies are resorting to this and forecasting margin and earnings recovery though there is no strong data to show this is going to happen,” said a chemicals industry source.
Take the US housing market and this post from Jim Quinn of the Burning Platform Blog.
“Everywhere I turn I’m hearing about the strong housing recovery that is propelling our economy, generating jobs and spurring a resurgence in retail spending by the millions of deleveraged consumers,” writes Quinn.
“I challenge anyone to show me the tremendous housing recovery on the new home sales chart below.
“New homes sales have ‘surged’ to an annual pace of 369,000, only 74% below the 2006 peak (see the above chart) and about 50% below the long term average. New home sales fell in December at the fastest rate since February 2011.
“Existing home sales also fell in December, are pacing at 1999 levels, and are still 30% below 2006 levels. In a country of 115 million households, with mortgage rates at all-time lows, there were a total of 26,000 new homes sold in December, and only 10,000 of them were actually built.
“For some perspective, new home sales are at the same level as they were in 1967 when the US population was 200 million.”
The rest of Quinn’s coruscating views on unemployment, the housing market, autos and education are worth considering.