Well if you think things are bad now wait til they stop pumping and rates go up even a point or two. The already horrible housing market will screech to a halt. Without a housing recovery there will be no economic recovery.
IMO the Fed has no idea of how to bring us out of this downward spiral. They are destroying the dollar. The only thing that will probably save us in the short term is the unravelling of the Euro which will cause a flight to the dollar.
Agreed. Everyone knows it and continues to whistle past the graveyard making money while they can as they can. Knowing it ends catastrophically and pretending they don’t know any such thing.
LLS
Bingo. The only goal is to get the housing market off its deathbed so that the Prime Directive, that TBTF banks don’t lose money, can be maintained. If things were left to markets, housing would have bottomed out and foreclosures would have been sold — at lower prices — years ago, and we would really be in a economic recovery.
Further on this story-—
A more hawkish chorus of Federal Reserve officials showed up at the last FOMC meeting, but traders are paying more attention to recent weak economic reports than to the history in the meeting’s minutes.
As a result, stocks soared, following through on a rally that began even before the unexpected 9 a.m. ET release of the March meeting minutes. The Fed released the minutes five hours early because they were inadvertently sent to Congress and trade lobbyists Tuesday afternoon at 2 p.m. The Fed has asked for an investigation into whether there was trading on that release.
Housing starts were up 25+% last year and are on track for another 25% gain is year. Compared to the 50+ years average of 1.5 milllion yes it’s bad but significantly better than the 500-600K starts we saw from 2009-11. Household formation is now back up over 1.2 million which is what is necessary for “normal” housing starts. The fundamentals of the housing market are the best they’ve been over the last 5 years.