Non-residential is still going strong in the mountains of western NC. Many lots being cleared and a big hotel going up in Boone. I've noticed we're about 6-12 months behind the more urban areas - residential really started slipping this spring.
"Stephen H. Macauley, president of The Macauley Companies Inc., has filed for personal bankruptcy, reporting debts of $131 million."
In recent years Macauley has completed 32 communities with more than 11,000 homes both north and south of Atlanta
"Other large creditors include Fairfield Financial Services Inc. in Macon, owed $37.6 million for four loans; One Georgia Bank in Atlanta for a $19.7 million loan; Community Bank of the South in Smyrna for a $5.8 million loan; The Peachtree Bank of Duluth for a $2 million bank loan guarantee; United Community Bank of Marietta for a loan guarantee of $1.8 million; and Colonial Bank of Lawrenceville for almost $1 million"
Barley - Former ball player Brian Jordan the biggest creditor on this deal...looks like he might meet the same fate as other big leaguers Holyfield, Canseco...
Covered bonds would pool only the best home loans, deliver savings to investors and benefit from favorable accounting treatment, Federal Financial Analytics wrote in a memo.
The group pointed to a potential accounting benefit as well: "Treasury says the banks can issue (covered bonds) through special-purpose vehicles that dodge a lot of regulatory capital.
Getting harder to keep track of these as the Treasury is doing more of them to make the actual amounts seem less.
Mechanically speaking I just do not understand how the dollar stays above 70 much less where it's at now.....with this destruction it's a 'friggin miracle...
All that Fed jawboning and the FF rate predictions now all but certain - No action. Even as inflation is tearing up the consumer (and savers, such as they are).
It's important NOT to become too entrenched as a bear/bull for too long. At some point, we'll start being wrong if we made bear calls.
With that said, I'm NOT claiming that the bear market is done, but to guess what a reasonable low point is.
If you look at CR's graph and pretend that the spike in RI and CRE never happened. Pretend that we're just on a gradual trend from Jan 2000 onwards...
What I see is this, the "expected" Jan 2008's RI should be around the $400 mark (or a little more), and the expected CRE mark should be around $350 mark.
This sets the "means" to revert to if you believe in reverting to the mean.
Which also means that the RI market is current in overshoot mode. This could indicate that a bottom in RI is coming.
Remember bottom in RI != bottom in prices.
This also means that CRE bubble is a lot smaller, and even if it corrects, you'll at best be looking at a reset from current levels to maybe around $300 mark.
Thw market takes two steps foward and three steps backward. The bulls i talk to and they are a resilient lot point to the gains they have made since 2003! Does the market have to knock against those lows to bottom? It may depend on how we get there but I read that the market has to retrace 60% of the gains form 03-07 to bottom taking us at least to 10300 on the DOW...
IMO not necessarily... Prices may bottom before RI stops falling. If we see a L shaped recovery in prices we could see RI continue to drop long after albeit at a much slower rate of decline. Prices are not yet near bottom in most markets so I don't expect RI to stop dropping either.
I am with Tim on this one. With the elevated inventories, increasing distressed supply and government delay tactics through all the destined-to-fail programs, we get an L shaped bottom. Price discovery interference won't prevent discovery, just delay it.
HC, what's your thinking here? It would appear to me that the HBs are not going to ramp back up until they see firming prices above their cost base. Given the existing overhang and remaining FC waves, that doesn't look likely in the near term. So how can RI bottom first?
U.S. inflation pressures fell in July to a near six-year low, driven by disinflationary moves in measures of labor market conditions, loans, interest rates and commodity prices, a report said on Friday.
The PPI for construction components is up about 7% this year and more in most recent months due to steel and other component increases so the non-res number with adjustment would be closer to the tipping point.
"It would appear to me that the HBs are not going to ramp back up"
L shaped bottom, gently lower, is going to kill HBs. The cash burn and homebuyer paralysis with no end in sight should discourage lenders from providing more rope.
The housing bailout bill also gave HBs a tax break. I guess this break saved a few builders from going belly up.
It also could mean that these builders will continue to build.
I think the scenario for either price to bottom first or RI to bottom first exists.
RI will bottom before price if we have a structural defect in the type of houses built in recent years. So perhaps RI will increase for smaller homes, multifamily homes, while the market (which has too many "wrong" type of homes) is still correcting and price dropping.
Price will bottom first if we have a typical oversupply.
It is not clear to me that either camp is the clear answer yet, but I'm pretty sure RI's bottom will probably miss the price's bottom seeing how all the intervention done to prevent housing collapse.
Commerical construction is not a subject that interests me a great deal, but an observation that I made while the prime rate was at around 4-4.5% in 2002/2003, is that a low prime rate= a big stimulation to commercial and multifamily construction. Some of the large housing/office projects take years to build, it is better to build while the interest rates are cheap, even if the building sits half empty, at a reduced market rent, for a year or two, than to build while rates are high and get full price occupancy upon completion. People are willing to move into the new shinny building as long as the price is right, it is the owner of the marginal multifamily/office building that gets slammed the hardest when that new building opens in a soft market.
Don't bite my head off just because I'm trying to find logic as to where a bottom should be!
Not at all, at least on my end. I'm as interested as you are in figuring out a real bottom on both. I just wanted clarification on what your scenario was.
Aug. 1 (Bloomberg) -- The biggest firms on Wall Street are turning to Europe for cheaper financing as bondholders demand the highest yields over government debt on record.
Of the largest banks and brokers, only Bank of America Corp. sold bonds in dollars in July, raising $72.5 million, Bloomberg data show. That compares with the equivalent $5.1 billion issued in euros and pounds by firms led by JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
U.S. bondholders raised yields for financial companies to the highest relative to Treasury notes in at least a decade as bank losses and writedowns on debt securities reached $480 billion worldwide since the collapse of subprime mortgages last year. Yields on bank bonds in dollars are 269 basis points higher than the benchmark mid-swap rate, or 7.1 percent, whereas in Europe the spread is 202 basis points, or 6.4 percent, according to Merrill Lynch & Co.'s Financial Corporate indexes and Bloomberg data.
Confidence among investors in banks and brokers has been more eroded by the credit crisis in the U.S. than in Europe and that has pushed up the cost of borrowing there,'' said Nathalie Deliens, a bank analyst at Societe Generale SA in London.In Europe, demand for bank paper has remained strong.''
They do these every day so it would appear that the answer to your question is never.
They just exchange one bag for another.
The problem is that the recent one (today) gets paid back monday...and they will have a fresh set to "bid" for then. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The amounts are getting smaller though...that says more about the ability to "project" it's improving rather than the bottomless pit actually having one.
What's with the big spike in WB ? They are HUGE into lease and subprime auto loans. My buddy the car dealer buys their 2007 & 2008 repo'd vehicles all day long, where they are massively bleeding on each deal.
he soaring price of asphalt has put two major road projects in Weber County on hold.
The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) says at the beginning of the year, asphalt cost about $350 a ton. But now it costs about $900 a ton.
The Standard-Examiner reports that due to the price increase, UDOT will not repave Wall Avenue between 12th Street and U.S. 89 in Ogden or Riverdale Road between 36th Street and 4300 South.
UDOT says it hopes to get to those projects next year. It also says if the cost of asphalt continues to go up, it may have to switch to concrete.
The Standard-Examiner reports that due to the price increase, UDOT will not repave Wall Avenue between 12th Street and U.S. 89 in Ogden or Riverdale Road between 36th Street and 4300 South.
Hey, in the early 90's I lived at the very crossing of those streets!
Remarkable delusion on Wall St. Toally disconnected from reality. Economy literally crumbling with auto sales back to 15 yr ago levels and declining and markets are declaring victory and a bottom.
Amazing. Of course the laws of gravity didn't get repealed just because cramer called a bottom.
...
"The concept of 'real' GDP is intended to measure physical quantities rather than dollar amounts. So that if you paid a higher dollar price but purchased the same number of physical goods, real GDP would be unchanged," said professor James Hamilton of the University of California, San Diego.
On this basis, U.S. GDP advanced at a 1.9 percent annualized pace in the second quarter, after adjustment by an inflation rate -- or deflator -- that was calculated at just 1.1 percent, according to U.S. Commerce Department data published on Thursday.
But consumers face much higher prices. The gross domestic purchases price index, which measures what Americans buy and includes import prices while excluding export prices, was measured at a much higher 4.3 percent in the second quarter.
...
"A carpet store in California may have a miracle in one of its windows.
Owners of the store in Porterville say the store gets a visit from an "angel" every night."
Porterville needs all the miracles it can get. Always has.
The housing bailout bill also gave HBs a tax break. I guess this break saved a few builders from going belly up.
Man, I'm getting tired of having to refute this myth.
The tax loss carryover provision never made it out of the Senate. Please read:
<a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/statement-terence-m-osullivan-general/story.aspx?guid=%7BA9CA795A-202E-4605-B09E-F24C3F9B178B%7D&dist=hppr>tax break died
If you can't even take the time to read the bill, or at least check out a few business sites or housing industry web sites (hint - there are quite a few in the CR sidebar), then please don't pollute this blog with half-truths, rumors and myths.
This isn't Yahoo Finance message boards, for heavens sake.
OK here is the challenge for all to see - the nominal GDP amount of growth in 1Q2008 was $119.6 billion, and in 2Q2008 the amount of growth was $105.7 billion - and we are told the real annualized rate of growth for 1Q2008 GDP was 0.9%, and for 2Q2008 was 1.9%, or that the rate of real GDP more than doubled while it fell in nominal terms...
\tCurrent-dollar GDP -- the market value of the nation's output of goods and services -- increased
3.0 percent, or $105.7 billion, in the second quarter to a level of $14,256.5 billion. In the first quarter,
current-dollar GDP increased 3.5 percent, or $119.6 billion.
[snip]
Traditionally there should be an increase in public construction - infrastructure - to deliberately offset a slowdown in private construction. Unfortunately the US and states are really not in a very good position to step up just now. They've been busy structuring things so that they spend more to get less than any governments in history. And now they are likely to see one or more years of decreasing revenues.
First?
Where is everybody?
Waiting impatiently for the Confidence Bubble to burst.....
Non-residential is still going strong in the mountains of western NC. Many lots being cleared and a big hotel going up in Boone. I've noticed we're about 6-12 months behind the more urban areas - residential really started slipping this spring.
As the non-residential construction thingy continues to pump out buildings that will remain empty, can't somebody cry:
"Turn off the bubble machine"?
I know. Let's have a bubble in digging holes for 4 hours a day and filling them the other 4.
What we have hear is failure to communicate.
Cheers,
Wile E. Coyote about to get a gravity lesson...
that graph sure looks like an overshoot of the mean to me.
yikes.
Looks like hard times are a coming for the illegal aliens.
Sivaram Villaleuthapillairamathorn was right!!
Ambac to Pay $850 Million in Citigroup CDO Settlement (Update7) - Bloomberg.com
/ snark
Ouch!
"Stephen H. Macauley, president of The Macauley Companies Inc., has filed for personal bankruptcy, reporting debts of $131 million."
In recent years Macauley has completed 32 communities with more than 11,000 homes both north and south of Atlanta
"Other large creditors include Fairfield Financial Services Inc. in Macon, owed $37.6 million for four loans; One Georgia Bank in Atlanta for a $19.7 million loan; Community Bank of the South in Smyrna for a $5.8 million loan; The Peachtree Bank of Duluth for a $2 million bank loan guarantee; United Community Bank of Marietta for a loan guarantee of $1.8 million; and Colonial Bank of Lawrenceville for almost $1 million"
One Georgia Bank $69M in deposits
Summary of Deposits: Institution Branch Report
Unfortunately, SV purchased in the 20+ range...
Barley - Former ball player Brian Jordan the biggest creditor on this deal...looks like he might meet the same fate as other big leaguers Holyfield, Canseco...
Looks like these two tracked right inline until 2001... I wonder what happened then? Cheap and Easy credit cycle.
They are pumping away furiously to try to keep Circuit City (CC) share price above $2.
I don't see how CC has enough cash to survive the downturn.
I think demise of CC puts a big dent in CRE retail and employment.
Here's some facts on CC's U.S. operations:
682 superstores averaging 30,000 square feet each.
92 superstores in CA; 53 in FL.
All but 5 superstores are leased. (5 are company-owned)
22 million square feet of total space.
43,000 employees.
Company is fighting age-discrimination class action lawsuit in California for firing older managers.
Cash and equivalent position declined from $739 million in 4/07 to $297 million in 4/08.
CC has almost no cash left. Wow time to start shedding assets. Be another hit to CRE...
I've mentioned before that even tho spending might be up and continue higher the total amount of construction put in place is much less.
Materials have continued to increase. Raw steel is up over 90% from January of this year.
Of course I don't know how this effects the current picture, its more a construction estimators observation.
.............
So rich,
Do you think CC is a good buy? This could be the bottom... I'll go check what mad money says and report back!
....................
ABK UP 45% This morning alone! How can I participate in this bull market ?
barely writes:
ABK UP 45% This morning alone! How can I participate in this bull market ?
barely | 08.01.08 - 11:20 am | #
Just buy now, just get in before you're priced out... Buy anything...
I think thats how it goes....
................
What happened Cramer called bottom on Wednesday?
If you watch his show now the caller quality is going way down. callers are Less Harvard more honky tonk.
Maybe now they can laugh him off the air..
ISM Report - not as bad as some thought but this:
"But we have a serious inflation threat. The price component of the ISM manufacturing index was staggeringly high for the fourth month in a row."
MB sales up 11% YOY
barley- "ISM Report - not as bad as some thought but..."
Notice also that the export index has fallen. This is particularly ominous, given the role of exports now.
Setser warned about this a few weeks ago and Roubini is screaming about it.
Citigroup faces formal SEC probe, state subpoenas
Citigroup to be charged by Cuomo, faces SEC probe
| Reuters
Get those bastards!
I-I-I did GO to-to H-Harvard
mp - but its not awful just not trending pretty.
Watching this for a few months now...$100M due today. Another BK filing 'cause a gov't dont got the money?
"Moody's drops Jeffco non-sewer debt to junk bond status"
Moody's drops Jeffco non-sewer debt to junk bond status | Breaking News from The Birmingham News - al.com
Where is Sheila heading to today, to get in on the pizza party ?
Stupid clowns for HAAAaVED helped get us in this mess.
From reuters more horse dung
Covered bonds would pool only the best home loans, deliver savings to investors and benefit from favorable accounting treatment, Federal Financial Analytics wrote in a memo.
The group pointed to a potential accounting benefit as well: "Treasury says the banks can issue (covered bonds) through special-purpose vehicles that dodge a lot of regulatory capital.
Someone asked in a previous thread why the market was not down more.
Possibly due to the combined effort of the FED/Treasury pumping a little over $57b (with it's various "auctions") since yesterday.....
TIO Reports
Temporary Open Market Operations - Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Getting harder to keep track of these as the Treasury is doing more of them to make the actual amounts seem less.
Mechanically speaking I just do not understand how the dollar stays above 70 much less where it's at now.....with this destruction it's a 'friggin miracle...
Ciao
MS
All that Fed jawboning and the FF rate predictions now all but certain - No action. Even as inflation is tearing up the consumer (and savers, such as they are).
All bark - No bite.
http://clevelandfed.org/research/data/fedfunds/2008/July/31/image1.gif
It's important NOT to become too entrenched as a bear/bull for too long. At some point, we'll start being wrong if we made bear calls.
With that said, I'm NOT claiming that the bear market is done, but to guess what a reasonable low point is.
If you look at CR's graph and pretend that the spike in RI and CRE never happened. Pretend that we're just on a gradual trend from Jan 2000 onwards...
What I see is this, the "expected" Jan 2008's RI should be around the $400 mark (or a little more), and the expected CRE mark should be around $350 mark.
This sets the "means" to revert to if you believe in reverting to the mean.
Which also means that the RI market is current in overshoot mode. This could indicate that a bottom in RI is coming.
Remember bottom in RI != bottom in prices.
This also means that CRE bubble is a lot smaller, and even if it corrects, you'll at best be looking at a reset from current levels to maybe around $300 mark.
Thw market takes two steps foward and three steps backward. The bulls i talk to and they are a resilient lot point to the gains they have made since 2003! Does the market have to knock against those lows to bottom? It may depend on how we get there but I read that the market has to retrace 60% of the gains form 03-07 to bottom taking us at least to 10300 on the DOW...
Remember bottom in RI != bottom in prices.
IMO not necessarily... Prices may bottom before RI stops falling. If we see a L shaped recovery in prices we could see RI continue to drop long after albeit at a much slower rate of decline. Prices are not yet near bottom in most markets so I don't expect RI to stop dropping either.
Hey MS when does the money from the FED have to be "paid back"?
"Remember bottom in RI != bottom in prices"
I am with Tim on this one. With the elevated inventories, increasing distressed supply and government delay tactics through all the destined-to-fail programs, we get an L shaped bottom. Price discovery interference won't prevent discovery, just delay it.
Remember bottom in RI != bottom in prices.
HC, what's your thinking here? It would appear to me that the HBs are not going to ramp back up until they see firming prices above their cost base. Given the existing overhang and remaining FC waves, that doesn't look likely in the near term. So how can RI bottom first?
U.S. inflation pressures fell in July to a near six-year low, driven by disinflationary moves in measures of labor market conditions, loans, interest rates and commodity prices, a report said on Friday.
U.S. inflation pressures near six-year low - ECRI
| Reuters
Hello Tokyo, the more Benny and the Bone heads along with CONgress try to stop this the worse it will get.
The PPI for construction components is up about 7% this year and more in most recent months due to steel and other component increases so the non-res number with adjustment would be closer to the tipping point.
"It would appear to me that the HBs are not going to ramp back up"
L shaped bottom, gently lower, is going to kill HBs. The cash burn and homebuyer paralysis with no end in sight should discourage lenders from providing more rope.
Jefferson County, Alabama, has decided to succeed from Wall Street.
Damn Yankee carpetbaggers!
RI is not going to drop to zero.
I'm merely asserting that we're probably already in or entering the zone where we're below the "means" for RI if you take 2000 and extrapolate it.
At some point, it will stop decreasing and get stuck at a low. This is the bottom I'm talking about.
Don't bite my head off just because I'm trying to find logic as to where a bottom should be! Sheesh!
The housing bailout bill also gave HBs a tax break. I guess this break saved a few builders from going belly up.
It also could mean that these builders will continue to build.
Just wait until Israel wipes Iran's military off the face of the earth...and see how resilient the bulls are then.
In case it's not clear:
RI bottom != Price Bottom reads:
"RI Bottom is NOT Price Bottom".
I think the scenario for either price to bottom first or RI to bottom first exists.
RI will bottom before price if we have a structural defect in the type of houses built in recent years. So perhaps RI will increase for smaller homes, multifamily homes, while the market (which has too many "wrong" type of homes) is still correcting and price dropping.
Price will bottom first if we have a typical oversupply.
It is not clear to me that either camp is the clear answer yet, but I'm pretty sure RI's bottom will probably miss the price's bottom seeing how all the intervention done to prevent housing collapse.
visit me on naruto episode
Toyota sales down 12.8%
rich,
"Events, dear boy, events..."
That one or another - or glod help us, that one AND another...
Residential construction, priced in gold, is now in Hades.
Auto sales have dropped off a cliff
With Ford down 15% does this mean they are getting cars back?
CORRECT: Toyota U.S. July sales fall 13.5% to 197,424 units
Commerical construction is not a subject that interests me a great deal, but an observation that I made while the prime rate was at around 4-4.5% in 2002/2003, is that a low prime rate= a big stimulation to commercial and multifamily construction. Some of the large housing/office projects take years to build, it is better to build while the interest rates are cheap, even if the building sits half empty, at a reduced market rent, for a year or two, than to build while rates are high and get full price occupancy upon completion. People are willing to move into the new shinny building as long as the price is right, it is the owner of the marginal multifamily/office building that gets slammed the hardest when that new building opens in a soft market.
HC,
Don't bite my head off just because I'm trying to find logic as to where a bottom should be!
Not at all, at least on my end. I'm as interested as you are in figuring out a real bottom on both. I just wanted clarification on what your scenario was.
CNBC has a lot of crappy commentators, but it's okay as long as Erin is on there. She's a cutie.
I CALL ERIN'S BOTTOM!
Funny...
Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
Nice graphic, too.
Milkman? Is that you dad ? Everyone when I was growing up always said my father was the Milkman.
Shouldn't the spot where the red and blue line cross be purple?
No, barely, I'm your dad. Your mother didn't want you to know.
Barley, Tier 1 cap on the One Georgia Bank, 21M, 19.7M write off...hope it was secured
I'm glad I have some SRS because it is a little spot of green in the red sea of my portfolio a lot of days.
OT interesting:
Goldman, JPMorgan Sell Bonds in Europe as U.S. Yields Soar
By Bryan Keogh and Shelley Smith
Aug. 1 (Bloomberg) -- The biggest firms on Wall Street are turning to Europe for cheaper financing as bondholders demand the highest yields over government debt on record.
Of the largest banks and brokers, only Bank of America Corp. sold bonds in dollars in July, raising $72.5 million, Bloomberg data show. That compares with the equivalent $5.1 billion issued in euros and pounds by firms led by JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
U.S. bondholders raised yields for financial companies to the highest relative to Treasury notes in at least a decade as bank losses and writedowns on debt securities reached $480 billion worldwide since the collapse of subprime mortgages last year. Yields on bank bonds in dollars are 269 basis points higher than the benchmark mid-swap rate, or 7.1 percent, whereas in Europe the spread is 202 basis points, or 6.4 percent, according to Merrill Lynch & Co.'s Financial Corporate indexes and Bloomberg data.
Confidence among investors in banks and brokers has been more eroded by the credit crisis in the U.S. than in Europe and that has pushed up the cost of borrowing there,'' said Nathalie Deliens, a bank analyst at Societe Generale SA in London.In Europe, demand for bank paper has remained strong.''
[snip]
Tim-
They do these every day so it would appear that the answer to your question is never.
They just exchange one bag for another.
The problem is that the recent one (today) gets paid back monday...and they will have a fresh set to "bid" for then. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The amounts are getting smaller though...that says more about the ability to "project" it's improving rather than the bottomless pit actually having one.
Ciao
MS
What's with the big spike in WB ? They are HUGE into lease and subprime auto loans. My buddy the car dealer buys their 2007 & 2008 repo'd vehicles all day long, where they are massively bleeding on each deal.
he soaring price of asphalt has put two major road projects in Weber County on hold.
The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) says at the beginning of the year, asphalt cost about $350 a ton. But now it costs about $900 a ton.
The Standard-Examiner reports that due to the price increase, UDOT will not repave Wall Avenue between 12th Street and U.S. 89 in Ogden or Riverdale Road between 36th Street and 4300 South.
UDOT says it hopes to get to those projects next year. It also says if the cost of asphalt continues to go up, it may have to switch to concrete.
Image of Angel Appears in Store Window
Image of Angel Appears in Store Window | Firstcoastnews.com | Strange and Unusual
A carpet store in California may have a miracle in one of its windows.
Owners of the store in Porterville say the store gets a visit from an "angel" every night.
Hundreds of people have been flocking to the Express Mart across the street at night just to look across the street at the angel.
You can't see the image during the day.
You can only see it, when the express mart turns on its lights, which leads some people to think it's only a reflection.
Buy, buy, build houses!!
The Standard-Examiner reports that due to the price increase, UDOT will not repave Wall Avenue between 12th Street and U.S. 89 in Ogden or Riverdale Road between 36th Street and 4300 South.
Hey, in the early 90's I lived at the very crossing of those streets!
Hey, it's Friday.
Which bank is on the chopping block today?
Remarkable delusion on Wall St. Toally disconnected from reality. Economy literally crumbling with auto sales back to 15 yr ago levels and declining and markets are declaring victory and a bottom.
Amazing. Of course the laws of gravity didn't get repealed just because cramer called a bottom.
you guys shouldn't be dissing Cramer like that. He single handedly saved Wall St from the credit crunch a year ago...
At least it is getting out:
Unconvinced by economic growth? Blame the deflator
...
"The concept of 'real' GDP is intended to measure physical quantities rather than dollar amounts. So that if you paid a higher dollar price but purchased the same number of physical goods, real GDP would be unchanged," said professor James Hamilton of the University of California, San Diego.
On this basis, U.S. GDP advanced at a 1.9 percent annualized pace in the second quarter, after adjustment by an inflation rate -- or deflator -- that was calculated at just 1.1 percent, according to U.S. Commerce Department data published on Thursday.
But consumers face much higher prices. The gross domestic purchases price index, which measures what Americans buy and includes import prices while excluding export prices, was measured at a much higher 4.3 percent in the second quarter.
...
"A carpet store in California may have a miracle in one of its windows.
Owners of the store in Porterville say the store gets a visit from an "angel" every night."
Porterville needs all the miracles it can get. Always has.
The housing bailout bill also gave HBs a tax break. I guess this break saved a few builders from going belly up.
Man, I'm getting tired of having to refute this myth.
The tax loss carryover provision never made it out of the Senate. Please read:
<a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/statement-terence-m-osullivan-general/story.aspx?guid=%7BA9CA795A-202E-4605-B09E-F24C3F9B178B%7D&dist=hppr>tax break died
If you can't even take the time to read the bill, or at least check out a few business sites or housing industry web sites (hint - there are quite a few in the CR sidebar), then please don't pollute this blog with half-truths, rumors and myths.
This isn't Yahoo Finance message boards, for heavens sake.
RE,
OK here is the challenge for all to see - the nominal GDP amount of growth in 1Q2008 was $119.6 billion, and in 2Q2008 the amount of growth was $105.7 billion - and we are told the real annualized rate of growth for 1Q2008 GDP was 0.9%, and for 2Q2008 was 1.9%, or that the rate of real GDP more than doubled while it fell in nominal terms...
Anyone? Buehler?
GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT: Second Quarter 2008 (Advance)
[snip]
Current-dollar GDP
\tCurrent-dollar GDP -- the market value of the nation's output of goods and services -- increased
3.0 percent, or $105.7 billion, in the second quarter to a level of $14,256.5 billion. In the first quarter,
current-dollar GDP increased 3.5 percent, or $119.6 billion.
[snip]
Technical Note Gross Domestic Product, Second Quarter of 2008 (Advance), July 31, 2008
[snip]
Real GDP increased 1.9 percent (annual rate) in the second quarter (that is, from
the first quarter to the second), following an increase of 0.9 percent (revised) in
the first quarter.
[snip]
SCA will pay Merrill $500 million to cancel $3.7 billion of the guarantees it provided on collateralized debt obligations
Merrill CDO Deal May Be Model, Bank of America Says (Update1) - Bloomberg.com
Traditionally there should be an increase in public construction - infrastructure - to deliberately offset a slowdown in private construction. Unfortunately the US and states are really not in a very good position to step up just now. They've been busy structuring things so that they spend more to get less than any governments in history. And now they are likely to see one or more years of decreasing revenues.