Existing Home Sales Drop 20%
First, the bad news: Housing is still a mess, and is likely to be a drag on the consumer spending and the economy in 2008. Year-over-year...
New One Family Home Sales: Ugly!
New Single Family Homes Sold in USSource: Census Dept. The Census Department released their New Home Sales data, and it warn’t none...
Durable Goods Flat, Business CapEx Spending Falls
Durable Goods data was just released, and it warn’t none too purty: +0.1%. That’s far below the expected 2% consensus. The...
Real Holiday Spending Was Negative in 2007
The Retail Sales post-mortem has begun, and it is as we expected: the weakest holiday spending season in five years. Total sales gains...
Christmas Eve Retail Post-Mortem
While we won’t get the full data for a few days, some early numbers are beginning to come in. The most chartable thing I can say...
More Retail Sales Hype
Most people usually have a good reason for doing what it is that they do. Whenever I am asked why I blog or push back against headlines,...
Cartograph of Oil Reserves
Cool map of the globe, with countries’ sizes depicted relative to their Oil Reserves: Courtesy of Energy Bulletin ~~~ I don’t...
Baseball Stats and Freakonomics Wannabes . . .
Much of investing relates to mathematics and the application of statistics. Markets are statistical data generating machines, and that...
Good Retail Sales — or Bad?
The initial read on Retail sales was pretty good: The Commerce Department said Retail sales increased by 1.2% over October 2006 2007, and...
No, Pending Home Sales Index Did Not Rise
"The worst part of the credit crunch" is already reflected in the data, said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the NAR . . ....