The Blog of Author Mark MacKenzie: It's The Housing Market, Stupid!

According to the Census Bureau, new home sales disappointed expectations by declining -0.6% in May compared to April when they fell to a 342,000 seasonally adjusted annual rate. The current rate of new home sales continues to hover around the record low pace that was set in January of 2009 at a s...

Apparently Warren Buffett didn't get the memo from Ben Bernanke, Jim Cramer, or Larry Kudlow about the "green shoots" in the economy. "I wasn't seeing anything.  I had a cataract operation on my left eye about a month ago and I thought maybe now I'll be able to see green shoots.  We're not seeing...

So this is the housing bottom that Jim Cramer is talking about? You know you have a problem when the NAR numbers for home value declines start to approach the Case-Shiller numbers. The NAR announced yesterday that the median home price fell -16.8% year over year.  The fastest rate of decline that...

In the latest sign that the housing market is indifferent to sub 5% mortgage rates, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the mortgage purchase application index jumped 7.3% to 280.3, the highest reading in over 10 weeks.  This was despite the fact the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage...

The National Association of REALTORS announced today that the seasonally adjusted rate of existing home sales posted a 2.4% gain from the previous month to a rate of 4.77 million units.  However, sales were still down -3.6% year over year. While the inventory of homes for sale declined -3.5% from...

There are housing analysts, and then there is Jim Cramer. For those of you who don't know, in August of 2008, CNBC's Jim Cramer predicted that the housing market would bottom in June of 2009.  Well, here we are in June of 2009, and rather than Cramer swallow his pride and admit that he was wrong,...

According to Reuters, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary said today, "I think the president has said this, and I would certainly say this, I think you're likely to see unemployment at 10 percent within the next couple of months." Yeah, like NEXT month. Thank you Captain Obvious. That w...

Wait a second, I thought the economy was recovering? Isn't that what everybody has been saying? What about all of those "green shoots" and mustard seeds that Bernanke and Larry Kudlow have been talking about? Didn't the new administration tells us that unemployment would only peak at 8% because o...

What the chart (courtesy of Geoff) at the bottom illustrates is a point that I have been writing about for the better part of a year, Washington has been slow to recognize that we have a significant problem, they have been lethargic in their response to it, and their "solutions" have been impoten...

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, housing permits increased 4.0% in May compared to April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 518,000 units.  However, the current pace is still off -47% from last year, and 2008 was a bad year for real estate. To give the current number some context, the ra...