Fun and Games With Bad Financial Reporting

I've included some graph pr0n to show just what the innumerate folks in the 4th estate have been doing.

We have a rather good article by Diana Olick, who explains that the bump in house prices reported yesterday were a mirage.

Basically, at different times of the years, different people look for different homes, and these different people buy different sorts of houses:

All that said, the Realtors, in a twist, decided to give the month-to-month home price changes today, because it offered, as chief economist Lawrence Yun suggested, hope of a possible “green chute.” Existing home prices rose 4 percent from February to March, according to the Realtors. Now, if you were listening before, you would say, ok, that’s because the families are getting into the spring game. But Mr. Yun points out that the usual bump up in spring prices is about 1 percent, so the 4 percent monthly bump up should be a good sign. I’m not going to argue with that, because it makes sense to me

But still, we get crap like, "New home sales down, but show sign of revival",and "Drop in new U.S. home inventories offers hope", which ignore basic facts.

New home inventories are down because developers cannot compete against foreclosures and short sales, which are nearly half the market, and the fact that the numbers dropping, but "exceeding" forecasts generally ignores the fact that the forecasters have gotten the entire housing market wrong.

As Barry Righoltz notes, the real number is that new home sales fell 41% YoY in February 2009, though the margin of error is ±7.9%, it's indisputably a drop.

The 4.7% month to month increase against an ±18.3% margin of error (!) means nothing. (link to the Census Bureau Data)

BTW, the top graph, the one that even the most mathematically inept person in journalism could use to figure this out, is in the Census Bureau report.

And then we have this report on durable goods orders, which again claims that, "Orders for U.S. Durable Goods Fall Less Than Forecast," using a different set of data from the Census Bureau, but using a similarly clueless group of economists to show that it "beat expectations"

http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/7573/headsmashkeyboard112129.gifOnly, as you can see from the graph, new orders are down 27% year over year, (graph courtesy of Bonddad) but we still have to see that, "Prosperity is just around the corner."

Gah!!!!!