Part two of a two-part series. For three years during the Trump Administration, the Fed modestly raised interest rates, but it changed direction when the pandemic and the accompanying lockdown…
Unaffordable Housing: Part One
Part one of a two-part series. For home sellers, life has never been better. For home buyers, panic may be setting in, as housing prices jumped at an annual rate…
Affordable Housing Is An Oxymoron
If you own your home, congratulations. Your children may not be so fortunate. With the unemployment rate below 4%, wages have been increasing, but at a slower rate than expected…
Why Home Ownership Is At a 50-Year Low
After eight years of historically low interest rates, and with the unemployment rate having fallen to a point near what experts consider to be full employment, it would be logical…
Habitat for Inhumanity
The idea was logical enough. Reduce interest rates, making housing more affordable, which would produce a recovery in the housing market. The housing market was at the heart of the…
The Economic Recovery That No One Noticed
The average recovery since the end of World War II has been 58 months. The current “recovery” has just reached that milestone. So maybe we should be celebrating. But what’s…
No Records This Month
Markets go up and markets go down, so maybe it’s not surprising that January’s stock market performance has less exuberance to it than the performance to which we’ve become accustomed.…
The Unnoticed Recovery
It seems that every day we hear about a stronger economy with real jobs, a recovered housing market and renewed manufacturing strength being just ahead. We hear about it. We…
House of Cards
The current housing recovery is not a house of brick, but a house of cards. The cards came tumbling down this week, as the U.S. Commerce Department reported that housing…