Hot off the press release:
New York, September 29, 2015 – S&P Dow Jones Indices today released the latest results for the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices. Data released today for July 2015 show that home prices continued their rise across the country over the last 12 months. More than 27 years of history for these data series is available, and can be accessed in full by going to www.homeprice.spdji.com. Additional content on the housing market can also be found on S&P Dow Jones Indices’ housing blog: www.housingviews.com.
Year-over-Year The S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, covering all nine U.S. census divisions, recorded a slightly higher year-over-year gain with a 4.7% annual increase in July 2015 versus a 4.5% increase in June 2015. The 10-City Composite was virtually unchanged from last month, rising 4.5% year-over-year. The 20-City Composite had higher year-over-year gains, with an increase of 5.0%.
San Francisco, Denver and Dallas reported the highest year-over-year gains among the 20 cities with price increases of 10.4%, 10.3%, and 8.7%, respectively. Fourteen cities reported greater price increases in the year ending July 2015 over the year ending June 2015. San Francisco and Denver are the only cities with a double digit increase, and Phoenix had the longest streak of year-over-year increases. Phoenix reported an increase of 4.6% in July 2015, the eighth consecutive yearover-year increase. Boston posted a 4.3% annual increase, up from 3.2% in June 2015; this is the biggest jump in year-overyear gains this month.
An oddity: The East Coast and Midwest are sucking:
And all the hypetimism aside, it is still the same prices are 2005 and that’s if you don’t count the real cost of money, buy sell costs and so on….
Still, there is a chance of new market highs ahead, or so that’s what the market thinks.
Dow futures up 66 in what may be a dead cat bounce….
Markets: Notes and Harmonies, Following Bernanke
While we await a fresh dose of Housing Data (reload after 8:20 AM Central for that), we have been eyeing the conflicted data on how this Fall works out.
On the one hand, we have a Fed which is talking rates. But arguably on the other side, there’s a case rates will continue low for a very long time into the future.
The mainstream media tends to lose track of people when they leave public service. Such is the media, more fascinated with positional power, rather than brain power.
Yet way back in March, former Fed boss Ben Bernanke, now at the Brookings Institution, did a marvelous job of summing up the nation’s economic problems in a four part report you can read starting with “Why are interest rates so low?”
Although Bernanke doesn’t update his blog as often as lesser mortals, like Ures truly, he is keen on asking some of the same questions we do. Things like “Greece and Europe: Is Europe holding up its end of the bargain?”
Readers around here already know the answer to that: Greece financial calamity has been a deft way for the European central government megalomaniacs to in effect, buy the central bank of Greece. Bernanke being in a far more sensitive spot can’t, perhaps, be so direct. But he has at least articulated the question well.
There are others to be asked, many of which we get into in this morning’s Coping section where we wonder just how accidental was 9/11…and for that matter, how “accidental” was the blow up at Glencore Monday?
In coming weeks, we should find out how bad Glencore is. As of this morning, though, there is some talk of taking the firm private and hopes that rug is big enough to sweep things under. If it won’t “fit under the rug” I think one of the healthiest outcomes could be the realization in the investment community that bailouts are a passing fad.
There simply isn’t enough money around to bail out everyone who wants to hold the global financial system hostage.
Tomorrow morning in our www.Peoplenomics.com report, where get into the nuts and bolts of understanding where things are, we will get better resolution. But to say we are getting close to the lower limit of Wave 4 – where the markets should begin to levitate as we move to a new President in 2017 – is the height of understatement.
Being in cash since July has been a very astute (or lucky) thing to do. But we have this odd harmony off the previous Depression than haunts like a sour note in an orchestra.
The historical fact is that although the onset of the Great Depression was 1929, the absolute lows of interest rates did not occur until 13 years later. In other words, just because you get an initial low in the markets, as happened in 2009, doesn’t mean life gets good.
While we continue to anticipate something of a recovery (and perhaps an extreme and surprising rally above Dow 25,000) there are still possibilities that argue the lower case, in which event, we will be under the 2009 lows, just as things got bad in the secondary Depression in 1937-38.
Thus, one of thought with some street creds is that 2009’s low was like the ‘31 lows and that we should have a second low to come. That could be next year.
Or, goes the other school of thought, we have not yet seen the blow-off top in stocks that SHOULD comes with rates so incredibly low.
Which view is correct (rally first, then secondary depression) or secondary depression essentially right now will be revealed in due course.,
In the meantime, the 1,740 level and the 1,820 S&P levels above that, remain our “lines in the sand that will determine the economic future.”
As you’ll read in our Coping section this morning, additional “terrorism” may be expected if we sail below 1,740.
There is, in economics and life, a certain turning of the screw – harmonies with the odd flat note. Lots of geniuses (like Chris Carolan who has done much spiral calendar work) have tried different approaches to “getting it right, well in advance.”
But more often than not, it’s like being a cautious driver on a mountain road in a blinding snow storm. You can’t get too focused on what ahead, up around the next corner.
All you can do is keep the speeds down and your attention focused immediately ahead at the hundred feet, or so, of roadway you can see.
That’s what cash is…Because of systemic risks like “electro-terror” we will soon be unloading a batch of cash into our TreasuryDirect account.
The problem in uncertain times is allocating your assets so that no matter what happens, your nest egg will have a reasonable chance of survival intact.
Putin, Obama, and That OTHER Rhyme
There’s another troubling point to consider as you shepherd your nest egg around:
Recall that Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and there is a remote (but real) possibility that the warring on Syria is a sort of modern analog to that event.
We notice in the New York Times how Barrack Obama and Vlad Putin are playing something akin to “political poker” on this topic, but it seems almost a rhyme of the earlier era when there was talk of appeasement and such with Hitler’s Germany.
The most bothersome point is that if we look at the Invasion of Poland as 1939, and the ultimate long wave cycle low of interest rates in 1942, then we should (about now) be 2 1/2 years from Global War.
This should explain why it is so important to “get things right” in economic matters.
We need to have enough money left in our nest eggs to buy the building materials to build the fallout shelter and seal ourselves away from the DNA biological warfare that would come with Global All-Out War.
Meanwhile, the various sideshows go on, including Afghanistan where big (but meaningless to the flow of history) headlines currently predominate.
Obama Trashing the Constitution (Still and Again)
With the street organizer in chief’s latest (attempts coming to “internationalize” the Internet) a fair number of people in Washington are wondering where he thinks that is permitted by the Constitution.
Though with 15 months to go, why should it matter now, huh?
Still, it’s more FU’ed than ever when a purported Constitutional scholar doesn’t seem to grok Article IV Section 3, Clause 2 which clearly states:
Not the effing United Nitwits, thank you. Not the president…but CONGRESS and yes, the Internet inside these United States belongs to We the People, not they that would suppress and exploit us.
The socialists in power seem to believe in the revisionism theory that the Clause only applies to physical land. Which is a crock, but this is why I hold that so many lawyers are crooked – I can find a lawyer to argue (make up) an interpretation of “law” I can afford to write checks for.
We Mean Beans
This is National Coffee Day…
A list of freebies and such may be found here. McDonalds is likely the closest.
LOL, to the fake outrage from Congress towards the POTUS transferring the internet to an “International” non-government controlled group (ie private interests). Something undoubtedly “R” Congress would have supported if it were a different PREZ. A true socialist would have kept the property in government coffers.
Why oh why is Houston NOT in the Housing numbers.