Real estate announcements dominated recent macroeconomic reports with what appeared to be disappointing housing starts and soaring existing home sales. After several months of steady increases, housing prices showed a modest 0.3% decline during September.

While I'm not calling for the roof to cave in, I expect housing statistics to be a bit sluggish over the next several months, driven by normal seasonality and the potential expiration of the housing credit. With housing starts holding at 20% or so off the bottom, residential construction will no longer be a drag on employment or GDP. As I see it, retail spending over the next few months will carry considerably more weight than small undulations in the housing numbers--that is, unless the housing market goes into another free-fall, which isn't in my crystal ball.   More 

Yesterday, we criticized The Wall Street Journal for highlighting extremely negative mortgage statistics from Zillow.com. Only at the end of the article did the writer mention that other sources of mortgage data were seeing less drastic changes.  Our point at the time was that the paper was highlighting the more dramatic and negative number. I also commented that the magnitude of the jump struck me as being highly unusual. It turns out that Zillow.com had given the wrong data to the Journal, which posted a correction on A2 of today's paper.   More 

We have noticed lately that a lot of economic data is getting published that shouldn't, at least not without setting some type of context or some analysis. We first noticed the trend several months ago when the media breathlessly claimed that initial unemployment claims were at their worst levels since World War II and conveniently forgot to mention that the U.S. population was also now greater than it was in 1945. In fact, the U.S. population has more than doubled. Then, even worse in our mind, once the weekly initial claims for unemployment starting turning less ominous about a month ago, the media began focusing on continuing claims report, which is released on a one-week delayed basis and is much more of a lagging indicator than initial claims.   More