Entries by Wolf Richter

The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in America, January Update: Now Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego Plunge Fastest

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

This takes some doing: San Francisco Bay Area house prices plunged faster from the peak than they’d spiked to the peak. Housing Bubble 2 continues to deflate relentlessly, no matter what data set we’re looking at. Today we got the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index for “November,” which is a three-month moving average of home sales […]

Dip in Mortgage Rates Not Slowing Housing Bust 2: Mortgage Lenders Sing the Blues

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

It just keeps getting worse.  Mortgage applications to purchase a home are a forward-looking indicator of where home sales volume will be. Existing home sales that closed in November already plunged by 35% year-over-year, the 16th month in a row of year-over-year declines, making for a historic plunge. And mortgage applications went in the wrong direction […]

The Price of Easy Money Now Coming Due

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Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

The Crazy Stuff & Asset Prices that arose during Easy Money are coming unglued as Easy Money ended. The era of money-printing and interest-rate repression in the United States, which started in 2008, gave rise to all kinds of stuff, and the easy money kept going and kept going, and all this money needed to […]

Starting to Be Housing Bust 2 for Homebuilders & New Single-Family Houses

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

To get rid of ballooning inventories amid spiking cancellations & plunging sales, builders try to sell to rental operations, but they pulled back too.   If a homebuilder cannot sell their ballooning inventory of unsold new houses to households, at current prices and mortgage rates, amid plunging sales and soaring cancellation rates of signed contracts – topping out […]

Home Sales Plunge, Investors Pull Back Too, Prices Drop 8.4% in 4 Months

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Sellers are struggling with denial: Priced “right,” a home will sell, but “right” is where the buyers are, and they’re a lot lower. Sales of all types of previously owned homes – houses, condos, and co-ops – fell by 5.9% in October from September, the ninth month in a row of declines, to a seasonally adjusted […]

HOUSING BUBBLE: Price Drops Spread Across America

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Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute

Big drops in San Diego, Los Angeles, Dallas, Portland, Phoenix, Boston. Prices going down faster than they’d spiked? No way. Oops.   This is the first month in this cycle that the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which lags reality on the ground by 4-6 months, is showing house price declines in all the metros in […]

Housing Bubble: Buyer Traffic and Homebuilder Confidence Plunge Faster than Expected

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Holy-moly mortgage rates of 7% slash demand for new houses due to super-inflated prices, but prices are now coming down.   Traffic of prospective buyers of new single-family houses plunged to the lowest since 2012, excluding the two lockdown months April and May, and is now approaching even the levels of those two lockdown months, […]

Social Security COLA for 2023 Biggest since 1981, Might Finally Outpace Inflation, Unless Inflation Dishes Up More Surprises

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Beneficiaries got whacked over the head in 2021 and 2022 by raging inflation that outran the COLAs.   Among the raging and worse-than-expected inflation data released today was the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), which the Social Security Administration uses to calculate the Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) for Social Security benefits. […]