I suspect the big drop in sales is due to banks dragging their feet on foreclosures.

The feet dragging allowed banks to pretend they were still solvent and it kept additional low priced inventory off the market.

In the end, the banks will suffer even worse losses as prices continue to collapse.

We need a bigger TARP.

Can we add a quote from the NAR for comic relief?

Not going to be a housing recovery...

Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Chris Lytle, chief operating officer of the port of Long Beach, California, took in a panorama of the slumping world economy from his rooftop observation deck one day this month.

Shipping cranes stood still, truck traffic trickled and a cargo vessel sat idle, moored to a pier.

“You never see that,” Lytle said. “It’s quiet. Too quiet.”

Port traffic has slowed from North America to Europe and Asia as a recession erodes consumer demand and the credit crisis chokes off loans to export-dependent companies. International trade is set to fall by more than 2 percent next year, the most since the World Bank began measuring it in 1971. Idle ports around the globe are showing how quickly a collapse in trade can spread, undermining growth in each country it reaches.

September and October are typically Long Beach’s busiest months as U.S. retailers take deliveries for holiday sales. This year, imports fell 15.8 percent from a year earlier in September, 9.5 percent in October and 13.6 percent in November.

But we are still on track for a mid 2009 recovery right?

Right?

In addition to population changes there are other factors to consider.  Household formation rates incresed, age of household formation decreased.  The elderly are remaining independent longer.  It is important to considered demographic shifts when comparing trends that span decades. 

Another really bad report on new home sales. All we need is another dozen or so of these and we're on the road to recovery.

An interesting anomaly in the Census Bureau's numbers. In October 406,000 new homes were for sale. In November,
there were 372,000 new homes for sale. A difference of 34,000. But only 28,000 new homes were sold. Somehwere 6,000 new homes seem to have disappeared.

If the builders don't build any new homes for another 13 months or so, there won't be any new homes to sell. Maybe that will stabilize the housing market.

Home builders are dead men walking.
Elvis | 12.23.08 - 10:40 am | #

And yet we've still haven't got a major BK nor even a shotgun marriage.  Anf what about St. Joe?  Whats up with that?  Their land is in many cases worth less than nothing as the carrying costs will wipe out any concievable sales price in the future. 

Inventory.  Yeah, we need housing numbers to be twisted like we do with employment numbers.  H-3 can be the reported figure that the NAR touts showing the recovery is imminent.  H-6 can include expired listings and peopleple who have given up trying to sell.  Then we can add in the burgeoning REO/not on market inventory and finally, the rented for negative cash flow properties. 

The shylock business continues
(At a Sept. 23 Senate Banking Committee hearing in Washington, Paulson called for transparency in the purchase of distressed assets under the TARP program.
`We need oversight,'' Paulson told lawmakers. ``We need protection. We need transparency. I want it. We all want it.'' ) - Bloomberg

'Consistent with Congress' intent, we are committed to transparency and oversight in all aspects of the program ..' - Neel Kashkari

Transparency throughout this process will be important, and I look forward to providing regular updates as we move ahead to implement this strategy, - Henry Paulson

By MATT APUZZO
Dec 22, 9:52 am ET
AP

WASHINGTON – It's something any bank would demand to know before handing out a loan: Where's the money going?
But after receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation's largest banks say they can't track exactly how they're spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it.
"We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it. We've not given any accounting of, 'Here's how we're doing it,'" said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. "We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to."
The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what's the plan for the rest?
None of the banks provided specific answers.
"We're not providing dollar-in, dollar-out tracking," said Barry Koling, a spokesman for Atlanta, Ga.-based SunTrust Banks Inc., which got $3.5 billion in taxpayer dollars.
Some banks said they simply didn't know where the money was going.
"We manage our capital in its aggregate," said Regions Financial Corp. spokesman Tim Deighton, who said the Birmingham, Ala.-based company is not tracking how it is spending the $3.5 billion it received as part of the financial bailout.
The answers highlight the secrecy surrounding the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which earmarked $700 billion — about the size of the Netherlands' economy — to help rescue the financial industry. The Treasury Department has been using the money to buy stock in U.S. banks, hoping that the sudden inflow of cash will get banks to start lending money.
There has been no accounting of how banks spend that money. Lawmakers summoned bank executives to Capitol Hill last month and implored them to lend the money — not to hoard it or spend it on corporate bonuses, junkets or to buy other banks. But there is no process in place to make sure that's happening and there are no consequences for banks who don't comply.
"It is entirely appropriate for the American people to know how their taxpayer dollars are being spent in private industry," said Elizabeth Warren, the top congressional watchdog overseeing the financial bailout.
Nearly every bank AP questioned — including Citibank and Bank of America, two of the largest recipients of bailout money — responded with generic public relations statements explaining that the money was being used to strengthen balance sheets and continue making loans to ease the credit crisis.
A few banks described company-specific programs, such as JPMorgan Chase's plan to lend $5 billion to nonprofit and health care companies next year. Richard Becker, senior vice president of Wisconsin-based Marshall & Ilsley Corp., said the $1.75 billion in bailout money allowed the bank to temporarily stop foreclosing on homes.
But no bank provided even the most basic accounting for the federal money.
"We're choosing not to disclose that," said Kevin Heine, spokesman for Bank of New York Mellon, which received about $3 billion.
Others said the money couldn't be tracked. Bob Denham, a spokesman for North Carolina-based BB&T Corp., said the bailout money "doesn't have its own bucket." But he said taxpayer money wasn't used in the bank's recent purchase of a Florida insurance company. Asked how he could be sure, since the money wasn't being tracked, Denham said the bank would have made that deal regardless.
Others, such as Morgan Stanley spokeswoman Carissa Ramirez, offered to discuss the matter with reporters on condition of anonymity. When AP refused, Ramirez sent an e-mail saying: "We are going to decline to comment on your story."
Most banks wouldn't say why they were keeping the details secret.
"We're not sharing any other details. We're just not at this time," said Wendy Walker, a spokeswoman for Dallas-based Comerica Inc., which received $2.25 billion from the government.
Heine, the New York Mellon Corp. spokesman who said he wouldn't share spending specifics, added: "I just would prefer if you wouldn't say that we're not going to discuss those details."
The banks which came closest to answering the questions were those, such as U.S. Bancorp and Huntington Bancshares Inc., that only recently received the money and have yet to spend it. But neither provided anything more than a generic summary of how the money would be spent.
Warren, the congressional watchdog appointed by Democrats, said her oversight panel will try to force the banks to say where they've spent the money.
"It would take a lot of nerve not to give answers," she said.
But Warren said she's surprised she even has to ask.
"If the appropriate restrictions were put on the money to begin with, if the appropriate transparency was in place, then we wouldn't be in a position where you're trying to call every recipient and get the basic information that should already be in public documents," she said.

Are we still on track for that second half recovery?
Mad Mullah | 12.23.08 - 10:57 am | #

2050-2099? 

NYC Homeless Reaches Highest Levels In 25 Years
NYC Homeless Reaches Highest Levels In 25 Years - wcbstv.com

I think most, maybe all, FedEx areas are independently owned. A route owner may have only a few trucks. If one truck breaks down, they rent one.

CR, again following up an earlier post on White House: Nobody could have known...

in an analogous way this reminds me of the early 1980s when I was studying at the Harriman Institute at Columbia (funny, Obama was in my Dynamics of Soviet Politics class for some weeks and went poof) almost to a professor - and supposedly we had the best in terms of the CCCP - they argued that the Soviets were immune to outside pressure due to trade representing 13% amongst other things and were a very stable country with a long political life expectancy... but there were a few voices in the wilderness arguing the counterfactual, forget the man's name off hand it was George + Eastern Eur. surname who said that based on mortality rates and other such things that the Soviets were collapsing...

was he and others listened to? apparently not... in the early 90s the question was did the CIA know? Bill Safire argued that from what he could discover the Company did not use their famous construct of an A & B team and under Reagan spent them into the ground by a stroke of luck.

I believe this to be the case. Gorbachev showed his had on this when he insisted at Reykjavik the SDI be included in the Zero Option (bad choice, Gorby)

CR, are we not seeing the same problem here but just in another context?

Why are there more illegal aliens now, verus 25 years ago? Seems like a legitimate question to me

Only if you're not actually living the U.S.

Do you ever leave the house?

Like I said, I'm perfectly open to being convinced here, but not without some kind of data

I don't feel a need to convince you.

Believe what you want. Dawg can waste his time if he wants.

Kunstler on fire with this post...

Legitimacy Dwindles
Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler

The tipping point seems to be the Bernie Madoff $50 billion Ponzi scandal, which represents the grossest failure of authority and hence legitimacy in finance to date in as much as Mr. Madoff was a former chairman of the NASDAQ, for godsake. It's like discovering that Ben Bernanke is running a meth lab inside the Federal Reserve.

What seems to spook people now is the possibility that everybody in charge of everything is a fraud or a crook. Legitimacy has left the system.

The bums who ran the US banking sector into a ditch have to account for their turpitudes. They can't be allowed to hide under a TARP.

Believe what you want. Dawg can waste his time if he wants.
Broward Horne | Homepage | 12.23.08 - 11:14 am | #

NFW my friend.  I saw where that one was going from the first post.  There's crowded parts of Oxnard where you can't find legal immigrants. 

Me, too, Jim A.
First thing I looked for!

New Home Sales, Monthly, NSA is my favorite CR chart-very intuitive. New Home Sales and Recessions or anything related to residential investment is very striking-as in lightning bolts.

CR, The home sales vs recessions was interesting. Giving it an eyeball analysis, from 1963 to 1994ish it looks like there is a mean seeking behavior around a 600 line. If one were to integrate the curve from 1994ish to the present and did some econoforcasting how long would it take on the negative side of 600, with some ringing, to return to what we saw from 1963 to 1994?
Merry Christmas and all other internet traditions to all.

There's crowded parts of Oxnard where you can't find legal immigrants.
Rob Dawg

there're are parts of Jackson Heights, Queen that are pretty much the same...