Hey Numerian…, great piece as usual. I was especially interested in the housing market segment. You may remember that I have said from the start of the financial crisis that the thing to watch for signs of an impending recovery was housing starts. A couple weeks ago Mauberly asked me for my comments on real estate on his blog. I of course, focused my reply on housing starts and said that I thought they were indicating a real recovery. Existing home sales may tell us something about what’s going on out there…, but housing starts create jobs and jobs are key to any economic recovery. Especially this one.

I hate to disagree with you…, and it doesn’t happen often…, but I don’t think we are seeing a “real estate boom” or “a mini-bubble or a full bubble”. We have barely bounced off the bottom…, a very deep bottom. I feel that we have a long way to run on this and if the housing start numbers hold up the next couple months we may be off to the races. If investors are already in the game, prices are rising, and interest rates are rising, there could be a lot of people wanting to get in before they go even higher. For how long…, I won’t venture to say…, but it could be well into 2014. I hope it does not turn into a bubble…, or the Fed may pull the plug too quick. I’d like to see us slowly and steadily work our way through this rough stretch.

The inflation question is a tough one. Is it inflation when housing prices crawl 10% off a bottom…, when that bottom fell 50% or more from its top? Or do you have to claw that 50% drop back before you start measuring inflation again? At any rate…, I don’t think we have to be concerned about hyperinflation of the Weimar-Zimbabwe type. Unless Ben Bernanke really drops the paper Bens from helicopters…, we won’t be wheeling around wheelbarrows full of Ben Franklins to buy loaves of bread. At least not us working stiffs. Housing starts will help the employment picture tremendously…, but it won’t replace all the jobs lost to technology and low wage emerging markets. There isn’t going to be anything to put pressure on employers for wage increases. You are right about a permanent jobless class…, and the need to develop a strategy to deal with it soon.

A stock market bubble? There is no doubt that the Fed’s prime objective is to keep the market afloat…, and they have made a believer out of me that they can do it. I was hoping that we would get a 10-20% correction over the fiscal cliff or debt ceiling thing. I would feel a whole lot better about slipping back into the market to take advantage of what I see developing in housing starts…, but I don’t think the Dow or S&P are really in big bubble range. We have had five years of pension fund money being steadily and dutifully (I hope) invested in the market and we are only almost back to where we started. I think we have to realize that the market is different these days. In the old days investors invested for dividends. Now they are investing for stock prices and we have big institutional investors and pension funds and IRA accounts and mutual funds. If us mom & pop investors start getting back in…, start funding our IRA’s again…, it could get interesting.

I guess the bottom line is…, anything could happen.

Anyway…, right on partner…, write on.

I'm working on debugging the comments. The idea is to have super fast loading comments but to get it all to work right requires debugging and much more to enable anonymous comments.

Yes, I do know that when clicking on a recent comment you have to reclick on the show comments link. Working, but whatever other issue let me know.

Another reason to keep comments closed initially is simply page load, how fast an article displays. We are a chatty bunch and write great detail so our articles and discussions in terms of web page load are really big.

That's what I read - the decline in Defense spending was the biggest seen since the 1970s. I don't know if they are measuring this by dollars or percentage. What could be find out about this decline? If it is a relatively small number as a percentage of total Defense spending, then what is going to happen if we have to chop $100 billion or $200 billion off their budget? Maybe the problem here is that Defense is such a huge part of the economy that we can't afford to pare their budget without throwing the country into a recession.

But since this is part of the "let's delay and focus on the deficit instead of jobs and growth"
that figure may change.

I saw another report stating $604 billion, so need to dig out some official numbers and sure didn't find them. One reason this overview was so late in being published.

As you know I go over the numbers with a fine tooth comb and there is nothing in this report that indicates it's an illusion or "not real" and will magically improve. Those inventories I found really not a good sign for Q1 2013.

Imports and even exports are always revised almost wildly since exchange rates plus Census data comes in late. The price indices for trade I find beyond funky as well in terms of tracing through did someone make a killing by offshore outsourcing something and assigning to U.S. domestic growth sort of hidden values.

The entire report is really across the board bad news and bummer to rain on the super-rich Wall Street party like the rest of America doesn't exist.

Argentina is facing a "red card" from the folks at the IMF for manipulating inflation statistics to reduce the true numbers. So why exactly is Argentina so different from the USA, the EU, or the People's Republic of China?

Who believes that unemployment in the US, according to the BLS, is at 7.8%? How is that not laughable? What's the real labor participation rate and real unemployment rate? Many sites not linked to the US Government give pictures closer to three times the official unemployment rate. And if there's one "objective truth," why has the US government insisted on changing the way it measures inflation and unemployment over the years? Is the government somehow getting closer to the "truth" or just becoming more insistent on covering it up?

Who believes the EU debt + unemployment crisis is solved and the Euro will last another 10 years? Who thinks Italy, and France, Greece, Portugal, etc. are solvent?

Who thinks China's ghost cities aren't real and trust the Chinese statistics folks? How can China still be booming and continuing to grow its export-based economy when the rest of the world (from mineral exporting Australia to i-consumers in the US) are losing jobs and have less money?

So why exactly do some nations suffer threats and sanctions while others can so blatantly manipulate whatever they please with no repercussions? Because while the Argentines may be rioting, Americans, Italians, and Chinese citizens are dealing with the same very real issues, misery, and concerns that leaders insist on covering up. It's just that those countries aren't called out for the public relations/lies as others are.

Right, they are trying to return to 2006/2007 with the same bad policies and same mentality. It is astounding considering what happened.

The news is truly hyping these figures and the current "buying" frenzy has much more to do with massive shortage of supply due to so much inventory being kept off of the market and also record low interest rates.

We're still working on the site, seems like a css black hole at this point. That said, when embedding videos make sure they fit into the small comment space and don't embed the full 640 width version. Also, click on the rich text editor to position.

Not a big deal, I didn't test this previously and comments have bugs when are "in process".

The sentiment, watching this massive propaganda on "immigration reform" we are being blasted with is we are in Zombie land.

to flood the labor market. It is the same old song and dance that was defeated in 2006, 2007 and the reason it was defeated is jobs. They spin it to be a bunch of racists but the entire country was outraged because these politicians spin it as humanitarian and the bills contain almost an unlimited amount of worker imports, all skill levels, flooding the U.S. labor market.