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 …)
If you are thinking about purchasing a home right now, you are surely getting a lot of advice. And most of that advice is probably negative. Why buy now with prices still falling? Don’t you realize real estate is no longer a good investment? Don’t you know that people who bought five years ago lost their shirt? We understand the concern your friends and family have. However, let’s look at whether or not now is actually the perfect time to buy a home.
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.
