Truthdig Homeownership is at its lowest level in 18 years, but housing prices are rising. Why? Because banks are creating real estate scarcity by buying up homes and selectively stalling foreclosures. CounterPunch contributor Mike Whitneyreminds us that in...

Monthly data released last week were sparse, but included a substantial increase in December factory orders, Productivity in the 4th quarter decreased, and unit labor costs increased. Consumer credit increased, and wholesale inventories decreased. This week continued...

Earlier today we had a strong South Korean PMI report. The latest? Taiwan. It just saw a rise in December PMI from 47.4 to 50.6. From the report: Please follow Money Game on Twitter and Facebook. Join...

They’ll tout the latest unemployment numbers as evidence for the strength of America’s recovery, but despite their best efforts to fudge the numbers, the unreported reality is that we are so far gone it’s scary. The decent...

This needs virtually no explanation. It’s a chart of the frequency of the phrase “Housing Recovery” in news articles over the past 5 years. The chart was created using the WORD function on Bloomberg, which lets you...

That’s the question posed in the title of yesterday’s op-ed by Ed Lazear, and it’s an excellent question. Looking at the statistics, 13 quarters after the President’s inauguration, non-defense GDP is only 4% higher (in log terms)...

Boomer demographics and postponement of marriage on account of student debt and poor finances are two of the key reasons that I long-ago stated the housing recovery would be slow for a decade. Declining birthrates now show...

David Rosenberg, the bearish economist at Gluskin Sheff, isn’t convinced that the U.S. housing market is on the up and up. He points to the number of months it takes to sell a new house. From his...

We’ve been writing about the recovery in housing for awhile now, but clearly it’s gone officially mainstream, since even Gawker now snarks that we’re heading back into housing bubble territory. Note that there’s nothing bubbly in the...

In a new post at VoxEU,  OECD economists Pier Carlo Padoan and Urban Sila and European Commission economist Paul Van Den Noord take a look at what a recovery could look like for a “typical” Eurozone country...