Counting on Millennial Homeownership

The report that got us started on this tangent this morning: Home prices in 20 U.S. metro areas are now as low as they were nine years ago, according to the just released Case-Shiller Home Price Index.

S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Indices

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Uncle Sam’s Fire Sale. Minimum Investment: $1 Billion

In my investment letter, Addison Wiggin’s Apogee Advisory, we spend a great deal of time, money and resources looking for new investment ideas that our subscribers can act on independently. Sometimes what we find instead is outrage.

For example, the federal government is about to dump millions of the foreclosed homes at fire-sale prices to hedge funds and private-equity firms with government connections. If you’re an individual investor who might like to get in on the action, forget it! You’re shut out of this deal.

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When Bank Profits Hurt Home Sales

The US stock market posted another nice gain yesterday, as the US housing market recorded another dismal decline. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, for its part, added 110 points to 12,190. But the US housing market slipped deeper into the murky depths of uncharted territory.

Purchases of existing homes fell 3.8% in May from the prior month to an annual rate of 4.81 million homes. At that pace, sales this year would drop below last year’s 13-year low of 4.91 million.

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Two Ways for the US to Go Broke

We’re in the airport. We can’t seem to get a signal. So, here’s an abbreviated reckoning.

From what we can tell from the newspapers, the US housing market got very bad news yesterday. New house sales dipped to a record low. Never before since they began keeping records a half century ago have so few new houses been sold.

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New Home Sales Plunge

What a difference a day makes. It was a very windy day; the kind that makes the whole building shake with each gust of wind. So that only means one thing… The nice springtime weather that we’ve seen recently will be bowing down to a return of winter weather. We saw this kind of action in the market yesterday, as the euro (EUR) – and most of the currencies, for that matter – stepped aside for the dollar as the European debt problems resurfaced again. More on that in a bit, but it was mostly a flight to safety type of day.

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It’s All About Housing

As I was sitting here looking at the calendar, I noticed that next week brings us to the end of March…and then it dawned on me that we’re already staring at the end of the first quarter. Simply amazing, where does the time go? It was a fairly uneventful day as there wasn’t much in the way of data to interpret or any market moving events, so most assets remained in a relatively tight range. I guess I should quit stalling and jump right in.

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Are New Home Prices Rising? Nope, That’s Just Inflation.

I keep seeing things, scary things, terrifying things characterized as “for the first time ever,� like Tyler Durden of zerohedge.com writing that “As per the August 31 DTS statement, the US ended the month with a new all-time record of $13.45 trillion in debt, an increase of $210 billion from the beginning of the month (or $225 billion in public debt, net of intragovernmental holdings). With just 30 days left in fiscal year 2010, the US has added $1.54 trillion in the eleven months ended August 31, a monthly average increase of $140 billion. As a point of reference, the US has received $1.53 trillion in withheld income tax over the same period, confirming that the US continues to issue more than one dollar in debt for every dollar it receives via income tax revenue,� all of which are new records of one kind or another! Gaaaah! I am screaming in outrage and fear!

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The Falling Dominoes of American Dominance

“How did it all come to this?�

It's a question we've asked ourselves many times along this Coast-to-Coast Correction Tour. The answers are everywhere…in Wickenberg, Arizona…Livingston, Texas…Lake Charles, Louisiana and here along the border of Mississippi and Alabama…

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New Home Sales Plunge!

Well… The chill in the air isn't confined to the cold front that moved through the Midwest this week… The cold front's chilly air has moved over the economic data here in the US and to a lesser extent, the dollar.

The dollar is weaker this morning versus the usual suspects, led by the euro (EUR), which has climbed and clawed its way back to above 1.27; and the commodity currencies look a bit healthier this morning, too. It's all about the awful housing data that had printed two consecutive days this week. I'll get to that in a minute, but first some observations from the Chuck flight deck…

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