Even as the economy began to fitfully recover in the last year, the percentage of homeowners dropped sharply, to 66.4 percent, from a peak of 69.2 percent in 2004. The ownership rate is now back to the level of 1998, and some housing experts say it could decline to the level of the 1980s or even earlier.
Disenchantment with real estate is bound to swell further on Tuesday when the most widely watched housing index is all but guaranteed to show that prices of existing homes sank in March below the lows reached two years ago — until now the bottom of the housing crash. In February, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shillerindex of 20 large cities slumped for the seventh month in a row.
[...]
The market signaled further trouble on Friday when the April index of pending deals was released by the National Association of Realtors. Analysts had predicted the index, which anticipates sales that will be completed in the next two months, would be down 1 percent from March. Instead, it plunged 11.6 percent.
And the recent jobs data from May is even better:
As of two weeks ago, the DC political debate seemed to be out to lunch on the jobs front. Today, as the conversation continues to drift elsewhere the jobs crisis seems to be deepening. ADP’s estimate of private sector employment shows an anemic increase of just 38,000, way below estimates. The ISM index of manufacturing output fell from 60.4 to 53.5 as well.
Someone really needs to do something about this.
Indeed. Of course, no one could have predicted that any of this would still be this bad after all this time - that is unless you're one of those elitist, Nobel laureate, know-nothing arugula-eating fucks:
I’ve never been fully committed to the notion that we’re going to have a “double dip” — that the economy will slide back into recession. But it has been clear for a while that it’s a serious possibility, for two reasons. First, a large part of the growth we’ve had has been driven by the stimulus — but the stimulus has already had its maximum impact on the growth of GDP, will hit its maximum impact on the level of GDP in the middle of next year, and then will begin to fade out. Second, the rise in manufacturing production is to a large extent an inventory bounce — and this, too, will fade out in the quarters ahead.
[...]
Meanwhile, the ISM for manufacturing suggests that industrial growth is already slowing down.
I’d be more sanguine about all of this if there were any indications that private, final demand is taking off — consumers, business investment, whatever. But I haven’t seen anything suggesting that sort of thing.
The chances of a relapse into recession seem to be rising.
That was Paul Krugman. In 2009. It's such a relief to me that we persistently ignore the counsel of qualified experts when confronting economic calamities of historic proportions. I know for my money, there's no one that I would rather have deciding our fate than the Very Serious People in Washington whose continued strategy is to rely on confidence fairies and the free market Jebus to cure us of all that ails us.
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