Tag: economic indicators

The Wall Street cheerleaders at CNBC would like you to believe new home sales surged to their highest level in more than...

Think of the U.S. economy as a sugar bowl. You can put a spoonful of sugar in your coffee every morning or pour a spoonful of coffee in the sugar bowl and claim you just made the world a sweeter place. However, the amount of sugar is the same either way.

Every four years, we get a presidential challenger who tells us the truth about the faltering American labor market at a time...

There oughta be a law.How often have you heard someone say that?Personally, I think there are already way too many laws and regulatory agencies. However, there's one...

Why are you here? More to the point, why weren't you here yesterday when I posted a fantastic story revealing how government housing data...

U.S. new home sales fell to an all-time low in 2011, amid growing consumer distrust of a housing industry that helped precipitate the worst economic climate for middle-class Americans since the Great Depression by placing short-term profit growth ahead of the greater good.

Officially, purchases fell 46% to a record low of 302,000 in 2011, from the 560,000 new homes sold to a much smaller population in 1963, when the government began tracking new home sales. The 2011 sales figures represent the third straight record low in as many years.

The real decline is actually 67% once the data is adjusted for population growth. The Cynical Times' figure for sales-per-million Americans is a more accurate measure of the broken bond of trust between American consumers and the U.S. housing and banking industries, and the damage that can be done when the Federal Reserve abandons the middle class to predatory business interests. New home sales per million Americans fell to 962 sales in 2011 from 2,958 in 1963 - the first time annual new home sales have ever fallen below 1,000 per-million-Americans.

"I blame the Fed – front and center," said economist Dean Baker, a member of the reality-based community who is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. "Amazingly, they just didn’t see the housing bubble and just didn't see how it could affect the economy."

It's frustrating to watch the handful of news organizations that cover United States economic indicators screw-up the same data month after month, as they...

The average American has no idea how precipitous the national housing decline really is because the true depth of the problem is being obscured...

This is a typical flawed AP story on job creation. The world's largest news organization seems incapable of understanding that all the fancy numbers...