Once again, the Case/Schiller Index has lived up to its name. All summer long, real estate shills have used it to jack up homebuyer confidence and fluff the housing market. Now, they are doing it again. Just look at the bullshit headlines coming out today:
U.S. Economy: Home Prices Increase by Most Since 2005 . . . US home prices up for third month . . . Index shows home prices rose for 3rd month in July . . . Money Daily Brief: US home prices rise for third straight month . . . Home prices gain for 3rd straight month . . . Denver home prices rise again, getting closer to 2008 levels
Most of this unbridled optimism is based on the just released Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller’s U.S. National Home Price Index data for the month of July, which showed that home prices went up by 1.2% since June. A one-point-two-percent month-over-month increase? Ain’t that something! (more…)
If you search your favorite news aggregate for “US housing market”, you’ll find a whole mess of headlines guaranteed to make you feel good about that crappy McTractHome you might have bought at the height of the real estate orgy. Turns out …
News about the economy has gone from apocalyptic to merely bad. Stock indexes and commodity prices have been on a five month tear. Hints are showing up that at least the worst of the home mortgage disaster might be over. Unemployment …
Everything the real estate industry tells you is a hustle. No industry is more geared toward pumping up the positive and burying anything remotely negative, leaving you — and truth — out in the cold.
The crash has not made real …
Every now and then I run across some important finance type saying something so patently crazy, such a complete howler, that it just stops me little brain. The most recent one of these was from Myron Scholes in the New …
The results are in and, completely and utterly to no surprise at all, the US banking system is in decent fundamental shape. Yup, Dr. Geithner and Nurse Bernanke had the 19 largest banks in the US drop trow, grabbed their …
One of the things Wall Street does best is confuse people. They are brilliant at it, making simple things seem complex. So today we’re going to go over one of the things they’re trying to make obscure and make them …
There aren’t a huge number of constants in the world of finance. First of all, that word, finance, includes a guy sitting in a cube cold-calling retirees while he’s working at Fidelity. It also includes Larry Fink, the CEO of …
