By Don Lee and Tom Petruno
RISMEDIA, December 16, 2010—(MCT)—The Federal Reserve, saying that the economic recovery was not strong enough to bring down unemployment, vowed to stick with its controversial bond-buying program to spur growth and to hold short-term interest rates at near zero for the foreseeable future.
In their last scheduled meeting of the year, Fed monetary policymakers gave a cautious assessment of the recovery even as more private economists raised their growth projections after a strong retail sales report.
With the notable exception of the November jobs report, economic data generally have been looking better in recent weeks. And with the compromise tax deal moving through Congress with its billions of dollars in new stimulus in the form of lower taxes, many analysts see the pace of economic growth accelerating next year.
With the combination of the Fed’s stimulus and the tax-cut package, the government is pulling out all the stops “to get growth,” said Charles Comiskey, head of Treasury trading at Scotia Capital in New York. (More …)
RISMEDIA, March 4, 2011—The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Department of the Treasury released the February 2011 edition of the Obama Administration’s Housing Scorecard. The latest housing figures show increased existing home sales as home affordability remains high, but officials caution that the market remains fragile, as prices are unsettled.“In the face of the deepest economic recession and housing crisis in decades, the Obama Administration has taken unprecedented action to promote stability in the market—keeping millions of families in their homes and helping millions more to save money by refinancing. But the data clearly show that the market remains extremely fragile,” said HUD Assistant Secretary Raphael Bostic. “While we cannot stop every foreclosure, we know that many responsible homeowners are still fighting to make ends meet. Through the broad range of programs this Administration has put in place, we can put help in reach to those homeowners as early as possible.” (More …)
For almost a decade now, every time we talked about real estate we immediately discussed money. We didn’t talk about the value of a home but instead about the price of the house. We didn’t worry about a roof over our heads but instead the ceiling on our interest rate. We didn’t care as much about where we raised our family as we cared about how much we increased our family’s net worth.
This past year has been very challenging for real estate. The market was defined by outside intervention. This intervention tugged at historic trends. Government involvment caused market fundamentals to be distorted beyond recognition. Unpredictability was the only thing we could predict.
