I do not see anything on the horizon that will stop this continued dropping in existing home sales. Financial analysts keep expected a month-over-month uptick, which would indicate the floor of the housing market has been reached. However, that ‘uptick’ never happens, and each report shows the month-over-month number continuing negative, meaning the slope of the decline is continuing and no bottom is visible.
The gaslighting financial media keep using terms like “the pace of the decline is slowing” in an effort to continue supporting the policies that are ultimately contracting the entire economy. The reality is behind the phrase “transitioning to the new economy,” which, by the very nature of the approach, means this is a managed decline in overall economic activity.
The temperature on Fed stove is slowly being raised, so the frogs in the economic pot don’t notice it.
(Reuters) -U.S. existing home sales dropped to the lowest level in more than 12 years in January, but the pace of decline slowed, raising cautious optimism that the housing market slump could be close to reaching a bottom.
[…] Existing home sales fell 0.7% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.00 million units last month, the lowest level since October 2010, when the nation was grappling with the foreclosure crisis. That marked the 12th straight monthly decline in sales, the longest such stretch since 1999.
[…] The housing market has been the biggest casualty of the Fed’s aggressive monetary policy tightening. Residential investment has contracted for seven straight quarters, the longest such stretch since 2009. Government data last week showed single-family homebuilding and permits for future home construction declining in January. (more)
“MANAGING THE TRANSITION” – The issue is quite simple, really. When additional oil, coal and natural gas development is blocked as an outcome of policy, energy prices jump massively. We are seeing 2022/2023 price increases in electricity, home heating, fuel, gasoline, natural gas and other total energy price outcomes in the 60%+ range.
As a direct outcome of energy policy, all of the downstream products and services have massive upward supply side price pressure. When the input prices are driving upward of 60%, the downstream prices increase accordingly. Farming costs, fertilizer, feeding, transportation costs, food at retail and wholesale, and just about every petroleum-based product, which is almost everything, increases in price accordingly.
If supply side energy price increases are pushing +60%, and the Fed will only accept a 2% inflation output result, the only method of achieving the desired result is to shrink energy demand. This is the goal of the current Fed monetary policy.
Energy supply has been reduced. Now, energy demand is being curtailed to meet that diminished energy supply.
Hey, is “pace of the decline is slowing” the same as “rate of (inflation) increase is slowing”? 😛
It’s all in the way you look at it 😛
A true-blue Dem friend, a real idiot, says “it depends which side you’re on”. What a dunce.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” (Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain)
then there is joe malarkey…
who has taken lying to a completely different level of moron.
will need to produce a durable meme for joe malarkey’s lie.
corn pop. It has that certain americana humor to it.
urban dictionary submission:
corn pop – making shit up…see joe biden, aka “joe malarkey the stupid for example.
God Bless America
God Bless America
Same as the commissar telling you that he will be applying the electric shock less frequently.
Good news! Yes inflation is up. But spending is up as well!
Due to inflated prices…
I am spending more on widgets but getting fewer widgets….?
That’s okay Aggie, pretty soon you won’t have to worry about buying these widgets.
“You will own nothing and be happy, now get in your 6′ X 6′ concrete box with your tiny bed and little window and shut your mouth”
Signed the commies!!!
A phenomenon known as shrinkage. Just noticed the other day that the block of cheddar cheese which used to be 8 oz. is now 7 oz. for the same price.
How much for new train tracks?
Here?? Or in Ukraine…
Exactly!
One does have to ask…
Feds hint new inflation target may be 2.8%. The money supply also needs to be tightened up. Went crazy during Covid.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fed-just-hinted-new-inflation-target-will-be-28
Homes are for capitalists. Apartments are for socialists. They no longer care about home sales. Soviet style blocks of apartment buildings within walking distance of the train station just like in China or Europe.
Or the town of Chernobyl?
You are correct! Now the burden of home repair prices are rising!
Single family homes are RACIST. Suburbia is RACIST.
What it all means is the BBB folks want to lower our standard of living. The unwashed masses were getting too uppity while trying to increase their share of the pie and needed to be knocked down so others can benefit, especially the uber wealthy.
The billions living in abject poverty in Africa and other third world nations can just die from starvation as food prices pass their ability to pay.
Their utopian vision of the future includes a global “manageable low-IQ population” run by unelected marxist totalitarians. They believe that most of the populace can be replaced by robots and want to remake the world in such a way as to have control over all outcomes, and that requires de-population.
Less humans mean less competition for scarce resources, less having to share “their earth” with crowds of lesser beings….an earth revolving around them in which they rule. There will be no freedom or autonomy.
They know a computer can’t repair another computer. I have stopped listening to these SCARE reports.
But there is God.
It doesn’t matter if you believe in Him or not.
When Jesus returns, it will not be a happy day.
Two years ago Pulte Homes started to build a new construction housing community not too far from our home. Usually the homes are built quickly 6-8 a month. No one is buying. The whole subdivision after two years has about 20 homes. The complex development map is for over 200 homes.
Blackrock and others of that ilk are buying up whole developments as they are being built. “You will own nothing, and you will be happy … renters/tenants.”
There is no easy way out of the mess that Obama and Schwab have gotten us in. The years of luxury and sloppiness didn’t help either, but it was the explosion of money printing following the Iraq war, put on steroids after the 2008 manufactured crisis. In retrospect, we were manipulated onto a war footing, itself designed to deflate the value of the dollar (WMD anyone?), then the devaluation of the currency was facilitated by the 2008 bubble, again intentional, all in the service of an eventual currency default and transition to digital currency cages. That was the plan.
What’s happening now is different. The Fed is not going to give over the keys to the kingdom to the globalists, and the rise in interest rates is functioning to drain the offshore dollar markets and devalue the Euro, robbing the Davosauros of its funding and hopefully softening the crash landing here at home. The transition away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is going to hurt everyone, but the Fed’s recent moves have the potential to get us out of this mess with as little contraction as possible.
You make an interesting case, castelletto.
I can’t accept credit. I heard it first from Tom Luongo at Gold, Goats, and Guns, and the thesis has been picking up steam for many months now. Danielle DiMartino Booth hails from the Fed and has seemed to corroborate much of it.
So why open borders? That is financially killing us.
The Federal Reserve has nothing to do with the opening of borders.
More demand for houses.
“The Fed is not going to give over the keys to the kingdom to the globalists, ……”
I thought the Fed(Banks) was owned by the globalists from the beginning of their creation, however that would not necessarily contradict the second part of that sentence: “…..the rise in interest rates is functioning to drain the offshore dollar markets …………, ” but that might not result in this “….. and devalue the Euro….”. The Euro rates might rise too
No authority here, but I don’t believe that’s true. I looked very briefly and found this article, which I just scanned. I know nothing about the source, but it essentially agrees with what I already had heard:
https://www.usagold.com/cpmforum/who-owns-and-controls-the-federal-reserve/
I do think it’s a good survey of how the system works, in case you’re interested. But here is the concluding paragraph from the article:
“It does not appear that the New York Federal Reserve Bank is owned, either directly or indirectly, by foreigners. Neither Mullins nor Kah provided verifiable sources for their allegations, nor did their mysterious sources agree on exactly who owns the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Moreover, their central assumption that control of the New York Federal Reserve is the same as control of the whole System is wrong and demonstrates a lack of understanding of the System’s basic organizational structure. The profits of the Federal Reserve System, again contrary to the assertion of Kah and Schauf, are funneled back to the federal government, not to an “international banking elite.” If the U.S. central bank is in the grip of a banking conspiracy, then Mullins and Kah have certainly not uncovered it.”
When people buy a new or up grade the digs, there are many, many downstream products to they want or need…all those widgets, as mentioned, cost…energy to make, raw materials and their transport etc…to the final product and its transport. So declining housing market has far reaching effects…as far as school registrations etc.
One big fluster cluck.
George Carlin explained all this in his epic rant, “Stuff”.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=george+carlin+stuff&view=detail&mid=0C9D83F33FC270ECA0790C9D83F33FC270ECA079&FORM=VIRE0&ru=%2fsearch%3fq%3dgeorge%2bcarlin%2bstuff%26form%3dQBLH%26sp%3d-1%26ghc%3d1%26pq%3dgeorge%2bcarlin%2bstuff%26sc%3d10-19%26qs%3dn%26sk%3d%26cvid%3d510817B31C7744F6B07875D1E8F1B35A%26ghsh%3d0%26ghacc%3d0%26ghpl%3d
Interesting stats. Remember, this number is two months old. Today’s yield on the thirty year bond is almost 4%. As long as mortgage rates rise, buying will decline. You think February is a rebound month for a home purchase? Meh.
Look at how they played the PMI numbers this morning. Look how they spin most economic news as good news. Experts. Top. Men. All bad news they cannot spin is reported as “Unexpectedly”.
Off-topic: $500 million more for Ukraine.
This is only the beginning. They want us all living in high-rise apartments and either walking or riding mass transit.
They are in the process of outlawing gasoline vehicles and are already saying electric vehicles cannot work on a large scale. There is not enough electric grid capacity for millions of EV’s.
This is the communist way. Only a few will have private transportation.
The scale of the economic disaster on the horizon is beyond imagination. America is a nation geared to traveling in private vehicles. Tourism will be vastly reduced. Shopping will be greatly limited. The extreme shrinking of America’s future economy is hard to envision.
Cars represent American liberty. We will lose all liberty to these tyrants. They will have everything. We will have nothing.
Retired Magistrate here: Nope, at 75 years on this earth I refuse to comply. We are prepared as best as we can and we continue to live our best lives. This is the day that the LORD has made and we will rejoice and be glad in it.
That’s black pill stuff. All is not lost. It is the second American Revolution, for sure, but the last one didn’t turn out so bad.
The majority of my and my sales reps’ days are spent behind the wheel, going from customer to customer. We’re not in a metro area….no rail or bus service to the chicken or battery plant….cars/trucks only!
I live in an area where mass transit is fairly easy and makes a lot of sense for some trips. Yet I hear, “no, I’m going to drive. I don’t want to be mugged or have my things stolen by the homeless camping out over there.” The overall degradation of society is pushing people away from the particular chute it looks like they want to herd us into….
The globalists elites have undertaken a bold attempt to increase and consolidate their wealth, power, and complete control through a series of gradually implemented population control measures. Freedom, liberty, free speech, freedom of movement, medical choice, societal norms, and the rights granted under the Constitution are outdated notions in the minds of these evil-minded tyrants.
It’s not not really about money, it’s about control. Controlling access, ideas, resources, and privacy combined with a surveillance state enforcement architecture provides that control. With control and power….the money isn’t even really needed….they can take what they want.
The election of Obama was like the flipping of a switch.
Did something truly transformational happen? (we had a mundane recession due to to the stock brokers selling junk bonds – pretty routine) or were the pieces already in place for a silent revolution?
Hillary called her dissent from George W. Bush patriotic, then shortly after Obama’s election, the editor of Time (Joe Klein) called dissent “treason”. That’s fascist language, so did it happen just that fast?
The people within the Republican establishment we thought were reasonable, even conservative, are emphatically no longer so. It’s like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/pending-home-sales
also noting:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/debt-balance-total
and “they” say we are not in a recession….which is sort of accurate….it’s a depression.
stay frosty…it’s going to TAKE YEARS to get close to what a recovery looks like. If recovery in the classic sense is even possible.
God Bless America
Housing is just one factor. And watch out for things like this as part of the economic ‘reset.’ The dependence on energy for food production.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11776167/NFU-president-warns-supermarkets-limit-sale-tomatoes-potatoes-cucumber-broccoli.html
But thankfully, we have Yuma, El Centro CA, Mexico, and South America, for winter vegetables.
Redfin reported the same data with the same analysis: The airplane is not crashing as badly this month.
This is why they keep lying about inflation, and that next month will be better, but the next month never comes! They think nobody will notice, until it’s too late! Then they will accuse us of not warning them, like they are doing with covid, and the jab!
However, we are not in a recession.
The average length of a real estate correction, going back to 1800, is 4 years, 6 months. The housing collapse is just getting started. For those interested, link below is a good primer on how the cycles have played out over the past 222 years.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-economic-crash-repeated-every-generation-1800-2012-1
Correct…on average…up cycle is 10 years, down cycle is 4…approximate based upon area.
The globalist billionaire-led cabal, as well as their intelligence community and federal law enforcement goons….with the support of their media lackeys, have all but seized the keys to the Republic. They have installed a corrupt cadre of unelected deep state bureaucrats, marxist politicians, educators, and talking heads in order to implement their decades long plan.
They have undertaken a bold attempt to increase and consolidate their wealth, power, and complete control. Freedom, liberty, free speech, medical choice, societal norms, and the rights granted under the Constitution are outdated notions in the minds of these evil-minded tyrants.
Yet real estate prices are still very high in my area.
Real Estate value varies greatly across the continent because it is largely dependent upon a variety of local characteristics: demographics, proximity to significant employment, geography, local climate, proximity to major recreational natural features (mountains, beache, etc.) and facilities, educational institutions, and major government facilities.
Every real estate bull or bear market will be felt differently across the country because of the features (listed above) being present in varying amounts in every location.
You’re correct. I was just expressing my frustration as a buyer.
However, home prices are still historically high for the area I live in. I am not talking relative to the national average, I am talking to the housing prices a few years ago where i live. All of the factors you mentioned were identical a few years ago.
Same. *Really* want to buy.
Refuse to buy at these over-inflated ridiculous prices tho.
They’re high in a lot of places.
Around my area of FL., it’s sellers who refuse to believe they can’t get top dollar for their homes that doubled in price in a year and a half.
They are now in the fools mode of “chasing the market down”.
I want to buy. But not until they wake up and smell the f*cking coffee.
Today, my wife found out two major realty offices in town are closing down. Her own business was off 70% last year and the problem is that the association fees and licenses and prospecting costs have continued. Especially, home viewing has had a major cost increase from fuel and now many are unable to qualify, making wasted prospecting.
I have a co-worker who pretends to be a part-time real estate salesman.
In reality, he keeps his real estate license to deduct the cost of his commute to work – nothing to do with real estate.
Commuting is not a deductible cost. Your friend would have to pay income tax on the benefit for driving from home to the first worksite. Same from the last work site to home. My wife drives 2 miles to the office before going on the road.
Thankfully we don’t have to compete with illegals for these services and that our elected officials would never offer financial assistance for them to use these resources.
Mark Steyn has written a great deal on demographics (he’s moved on to the vaccine).
Birth rates are at record lows in America and Europe. The evanescent bubble of the baby boom hides what’s coming.
Like the price of gas, a low birth rate ripples through the economy. Unlike the price of gas, declining demographics take a long time to reverse (if ever). America boomed in the 50s and 60s, during the baby boom. Not a coincidence, I surmise.
Young people buy houses and start small businesses (and have more children). Old people do none of these things.
Leftists have a weird fantasy that refugees will take the place of the children they never had. The childless Angela Merkel harbors this canard.
The sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2008 was the indirect product of the low birth rate. Germans bought those junk bonds because there are so few investment opportunities in Europe (no children means no economic growth).
I wouldn’t hunker down and wait for the Brady Bunch or the Partridge Family or the Bradfords (Eight is Enough) to show up to buy your big house in the suburbs. You’re way off.
China had a law of only one off spring permitted per couple. Found out that the country was collapsing as a result. America will see this in the near future, this is not “make America great again” procedures. Need to start meeting at taverns again, like the forefathers. Find a way out of this mess.
Steyn again – China will get old before it gets great.
The future will belong to those who show up for it.
The Muslim world will win out by default. They have kids. Lots and lots of kids.
And the global warming nuts should be happy with the far poorer world that awaits.
As I have mentioned many times in the Real Estate discussion topic…if you are in a red state you will be fine…if in a blue state you are screwed. It’s that simple.
Red States are gaining population, Blue losing… Supply and Demand. Blue States put enormous fees and restrictions on development which only increase the cost of housing thereby pricing even more people out of the market. Couple that with loss of population moving south and home prices will move south as a result of lower demand.
In the South… and most all are red…solid Hispanic labor force…Construction costs will start moving down except for Concrete and Pipe. Builders are “buying down” interest rates in order to have more buyers qualify. Higher demand means higher home prices.
You describe where I live. (High demand area) Little for sale. Prices way too high. Still snatched up quickly. If you see one you like that is in good condition and a good area, ya better jump on it!
Yes…pay the price…upside will be greater than downside.
This Administration is run by Corporation willing to turn your paper money into nothing more than litter.
This – “The temperature on Fed stove is slowly being raised, so the frogs in the economic pot don’t notice it.”
Sundance, I think you discount the continual printing of money as a major reason for the current recession. I agree it’s energy, but it’s also government spending.
Government is spending printed fiat dollars which simply inflate the money supply. That reduces the value of the dollar but does not have any direct effect on SUPPLY of goods in all categories. That is exactly why a family with $100,000 of household income today lives (on average) no more luxuriously than a family in 1955 on an income of $8,000 (which was $3,500 above average income that year).
Energy cost, however, cuts across ALL categories of goods – from raw materials extraction and transport to final assembly and distribution to wholesale and retail. Energy affects all people in their ability to maintain homes and travel to work shopping and recreation. Back in ’55, gas was about $0.25 per gal, and heating (fuel) oil was about $0.13 per gal.
https://fiftiesweb.com/pop/prices-1955/
Whoever has the cheapest energy wins.
you just explained without explaining the ukraine (nix- US) versus Russia war.
God Bless America
My wife and I have been waiting for this to start for years. Rents are now approaching levels justifying building. Inflation and the economy are acting like a Bull whip. The trick is to time the slow downs before Jerome Powell starts back up the vrrrrmmmmm machine and inflation hits double digits.
It’s a flat out treasonous betrayal of the American people! Outraged barely begins to describe my feelings.
Here in NE Fla., daughter three weeks into new job with Lennar Homes. Seems to be steady sold first house this week. could be regional
Nobody will be able to afford new car loans either unless they go to eight years. Used cars are getting scarcer. Why buy a new car if you work from home? Housing market bust part of the plan in many regions. All the EU nations have fiat currency just like the USA. Massive immigration problems. Just like the USA. All by design. Doom by design. President Trump was disposed of for many reasons. My only hope is in my faith.
My property taxes just went up because of last year’s rise, but I betcha they won’t go down next year to reflect the new reality.
On the computer chip front…
A formidable new rival is set to hit Intel and AMD where it hertz
https://www.techradar.com/features/a-formidable-new-rival-is-set-to-hit-intel-and-amd-where-it-hurts
Only when/if we see an end to the War on Oil, will we begin to see an end to the intentional trashing of the World Economy.
And, we won’t see THAT, so long as the WEF infiltrators of Western Govt’s remain in Power.
THEY will NOT (willingly) relinquish power, or change direction.
Hey Dutchman,
Good to see you here, I’ve missed your posts!
The median sales price rose YoY (no surprise). Inventory is still low. Without an adequate amount of inventory sales suffers.
Well here in western NC it is not declining…wish it was.
Just wondering if there is anyone here at CTH that works in the real estate business that can share some personal insight.
What do real estate sales agents do when there is stiff competition for any homes that are on the market currently ?
It seems that they would have to pick up some kind of side hustle when their flow of commissions stalls or stops.
OnlyFans?
Smart Real Estate agents that have been in the business for a while learned early on to bank and invest their money during the good times because they know tough times are always just around the corner. Really smart RE agents have little or no debt and can ride out the tough times. Unfortunately, most agents, especially the newer ones that get into the business to make big money during the boom time, can’t wait to lease that new Mercedes or whatever and find themselves with a serious monthly nut to crack and no more easy income. They either leave the industry or put their own wallet ahead of their clients’ interests. Just my own observations after 40 years in the business.
Makes me want to go out and buy a bunch of gasoline or plan some trips.
From Viktor Orban’s speech yesterday…….it’s a breath of fresh air because he tells it like it is to his people in Hungary.
“If we want to fight inflation, we must start with understanding. Why is there inflation all over Europe? Brussels has unleashed this affliction on us, with its sanctions on energy. The disease is called sanction inflation and the virus is the Brussels sanctions. Sanctions are the weapons in Brussels’ war policy. They target Russia, but they hit Europe. It was not so long ago that Brussels promised that these sanctions would bring an end to the war. A year has passed, and the end of the war is not getting closer, but ever more distant. They also promised that they would not extend the sanctions to energy. But then they did. The price of natural gas multiplied, reaching 350 euros at the end of August. That is a record, something not seen in living memory. The situation has improved, but the price of natural gas is still several times higher than the 20-euro level of two years ago. Moreover, and few people know this, in Brussels the price of gas was linked to the price of electricity. Together with the Poles we protested, but to no avail. The rise in gas prices has therefore been immediately accompanied by a rise in electricity prices – even when that electricity is not produced by gas turbines, but by solar, wind, hydro, coal or nuclear power. It is economics 101 that energy price hikes drive up the price of all products. This is especially true if you import most of your energy from abroad, as Hungary does
I can verify the current housing slump in my own town and all over my State. It seems like just another by product of the extreme economic stupidity of the political class, here in the USSR-USA.
All these decades of American folks looking the other way while the government set all this up is finally paying off.
You reap what sow!!
Since no one here in this country is gonna say or do anything but cry here’s a pro tip:
Go to Sam’s Club get a couple of 20lb bags of rice and couple 15lb bags of dried pinto beans.
Rice and beans Eaten together is a meat substitute.
I just don’t get why we put up with this.
The only way to keep reducing energy demands is to reduce the number of people needing energy. But wait, they are already doing this. bioweapons, like COVID-19 used as a vaccine, vinyl chloride dumps, I mean accidents, wars, fires, explosions at foundries, etc.
one other things to watch for, as noted earlier:
southwest cancelled thousands and thousands of flights just a few weeks ago…stranded many people over the holidays. The estimate is that this has cost southwest about 1 billion dollars in “lost revenue”.
but the 800 pound gorilla in the room, eyes blood shot and tossing furniture at the tv, is asking:
how was it possible that SW could “book” thousands of flights and then cancel them?
THAT answer has still not been addressed.
I have some fairly reliable theories:
south west booked these flights because they needed to show numbers favorable to shareholders over the single most important timeline in a fiscal year: the christmas holiday season.
they basically booked flights KNOWING they could never fly them and make any money doing it. Cancelling these flights thus worked favorably for southwest in several ways:
the reason I am writing these things, is not so much about southwest as to caution that this is going to be a widespread new “norm”.
we have already seen this with major US oil and energy companies…they did not need much from the joe malarkey show to drop all pretense and just screw you over as much as they possibly could..and have..and will most certainly do in the future.
this is the problem with the captive market problem in the US with large corporate power.
back when, you just stop buying the new coke recipe and forced the company to change.
that doesn’t exist anymore.
God Bless America
History repeats or rhymes because bad policies cause bad outcomes.
“…Existing home sales fell … to … the lowest level since October 2010″ when Biden was VP
“… the 12th straight monthly decline in sales, the longest such stretch since 1999″ when the Clinton’s occupied the White House.
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I wondered (and it seems from a few comments posted that this is the case) that the home sales are not contracting in FL, NC, SC, TX and maybe a few others.