re: Shiller Data: Real home prices for 1Q of 2011 less than they were in 1979.

I would think they would take out Internet/cable, but I can't say for sure.

Or at a rate of 1.57% annually since the 1Q of 2008.

I wouldn't expect that they have, given the whole housing crisis thing and what not. I'll go ahead and make a blanket statement that, without having any other information at my disposal at the moment and just general information, I would be flat out shocked if that wasn't the case.

Makes sense to me. So what we have learned:

In 2006-2007, home prices and rental prices were both increasing. Rental prices were increasing at a faster pace.

From 2006-2011, rental prices as a proportion of home prices have increased from 3.1% to 5.5%, approximately.

From 2006-2011, rental prices have basically been flat, but housing prices have plunged, when both are adjusted for inflation. Thus, renting has become more expensive to the alternative in the past five years, and by a significant margin.

TIME TO BUY BUY BUY

The NAR data from June would tend to make me believe that the C-S indices will increase significantly through the C-S number for August set to be released around the end of October. How much so is anybody's guess, given that NAR numbers are often revised by quite a bit, and since the economy was so bad.

I can't remember exactly what I said in the last thread where we were discussing this, but I'm guessing that I was sticking to my usual line of thinking (or hoping) that home prices would hold in nominal terms, while being allowed to drop in real terms as inflation starts to kick in.

I was thinking that 2011 was going to be a bad year for GDP growth, but the data seems to be worse than I had thought. I still stick to my main thesis that nominal prices will mostly hold their since their spring 2009 bottoms, and do so for a number of years. Now, however, I must concede that 2011 will almost certainly be a year where averaged out prices will be slightly lower than in 2010. I don't think, for example, that the C-S index will go above its 2010 peak. But that's relatively minor in my view--I no longer think it can be said that housing is what's dragging down the rest of the economy. Rather, I think we've reached the point where the rest of the economy is what's dragging down housing.

Incredibly, the 58.1% employment rate for July 2011 was a new low for the post-bubble economy--even worse than the winter of 2009-2010. People pay too much attention to the 9.1% or 10.0% numbers, but it's the 58.1% number that matters most ... at least out of what's released by the BLS.

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Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae

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reliable

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Nice

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I love how this shite basically just goes completely unnoticed these days.

What's another 5.1B? Fannie Mae losses widen in 2Q, requests $5.1 billion [LINK]

Will they have another standoff when they start getting close to potentially breaching the 250B reserve in 5 years or whatever?

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Blee me, I am monitoring these frickers just like I am grinding BAC.

Do mortgage rates factor into the Shiller index at all? 30 year rates are less than half what they were in 1979.