Understand that February is the shortest month of the year, and understand that new home sales are a lot more volatile than existing home sales, but the fact that sales fell almost 17% to an all time low, or at since records were first kept in 1963, 19,000 homes, giving an annual rate of just ¼ million home sales a year, is pretty stunning.
As the New York Times' Floyd Norris notes, this is not just the worst month ever, but it's also the worst 12 month stretch ever.
We are not in recovery yet, and with the austerity crowd doing the best to trigger a double dip in order to appease the confidence fairy, and very little push back from the sane folks in public policy, it won't get much better.
It is disgusting that there is no pushback from the Administration against the crazies. It is obvious that they're trying to derail what recovery there is for idiological reasons and political gain.
ReplyDeleteI've seen Robert Reich calling what the GOP is pushing "lies" on various cable shows, and have seen a few others doing the same. It's too bad that a bunch of these people don't start some sort of traveling road show to host demonstrations against the GOP policies, and call them the lies that the beltway media refuses to do. (After all, we've had thirty years of "trickle down" and it's never worked.) They could start in the mid-west where all the labor demonstrations are.