Healing? Q2 Real GDP Revised Upwards to 2.5%, Home Foreclosures Dropping, FHA Improving

Confounded Interest ^ | 08/29/2013 | Anthony B. Sanders

[whitedog57]

Is the economy finally healing? It has been over 4 years since the alleged end of the recession. Foreclosures are improving, mortgage rates came down a bit and Q2 GDP was revised upwards to 2.5% from 2.2%.

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The Freddie Mac Loan Commitment rate for 30 year fixed actually fell a bit. This is not surprising giving the recent trends in the Treasury 10 year yield. Still, the 10 year Treasury yield is up 115 basis points since May 1st.

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FHA Serious Delinquencies and Foreclosures are down to 7.57% as of June 2013, a noticeable decline from 9% at the end of 2011. But the rate is still higher than the Q1 2003 to Q3 2008 rates in the 5-6% range.

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The rise in unemployment (U6) in 2008 certainly changed the FHA serious delinquency and foreclosure rate.

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CoreLogic released their National Foreclosure Report this morning. 49,000 foreclosures has been completed in July.

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And an eye-watering 4.5 million foreclosures have been completed since September 2008.

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Florida, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut lead the states in foreclosure inventory as a percent of mortgaged homes. Florida is a 8.1%!

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While there are signs of improvement in the economy and the housing market, governments continue to interfere in markets through eminent domain, lawsuits against lenders, Dodd-Frank, etc. At least that explains why it has taken over 4 years since the alleged end of the recession to show signs of life.

[whitedog57]

Of course, it is all BS.

[kabar]

Since when is 2.5% GDP growth considered good? And didn’t they just revise the way GDP is calculated? More manipulation of numbers to create an alternate reality.

[wattsgnu]

Yay! Thank you Ministry of Truth for changing how we calculate GDP. Now bad news is good news!
We should do that to the inflation rate….oh, we already did.
And to the unemployment rate….oh, that’s right. We don’t count people who no longer get unemployment.
Now let’s change full-time employment to part-time so we don’t need to give them obamacare.
And don’t look at the labor participation rate or we will see it’s the lowest since 1979!
Oh, and home sales are up! Just don’t show that home ownership is at its lowest rate in 18 years!

Yay! All our problems are fixed!