Thursday morning at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, Christopher Rugaber opened his coverage of the Census Bureau's New Residential Sales report as follows: "Buoyed by steady job gains and low mortgage rates, Americans purchased new homes in August at the fastest pace in more than seven years."
Sorry, pal, it was the "fastest pace" in — wow — three months. The bureau's not seasonally adjusted home sales table told us that:
Ginia Bellafante's "Big City" column in Sunday's New York Times smacked of a particular brand of star-struck, fact-allergic old-style liberalism in which Bellafante, metro columnist and occasional reporter for the Times, went after an old enemy, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani: "The Dark Ages of Giuliani." Some urban liberals will apparently never forgive Giuliani for cleaning up the city and getting crime under control. After Giuliani made a common-sense observation about the homeless, Bellafante was so outraged she compared him to....Donald Trump.
Fresh off condemning libertarian "freedom" rhetoric as racist, TV producer David Simon, creator of the acclaimed HBO series "The Wire" and others, talked to the non-profit "public interest" news outlet ProPublica about his new miniseries "Show Me a Hero," on the desegregation of Yonkers, NY, after a federal judge ordered public housing projects to be built in white, wealthy parts of town. Simon lamented "the dynamic of hyper-segregation," then explained the term with the illiberal gesture of making insulting generalizations about an entire race: "White people, by and large, are not very good at sharing physical space or power or many other kinds of social dynamics with significant numbers of people of color."
Several commenters at my econ-related posts during the past several months here at NewsBusters and my home blog have noted how Washington's mix of high deficits, over-regulation, and quantitative easing never seem to get any kind of blame for the economy in establishment press coverage.
One could hardly find a better example of that deliberate avoidance than Josh Boak's writeup today at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, on how "Home ownership ... is increasingly on hold for younger Americans." While he identified several symptoms which could easily be traced to Obama administration and Federal Reserve policies, Boak never tagged anyone who might be responsible, instead acting as if all these adverse conditions just sort of happened and ... oh well, here we are.
Yet another important economic statistic confidently predicted to rise has fallen — hard.
This time it was June's pending sales of existing homes. Just in time for summer, they were predicted to increase by a seasonally adjusted 1.0 percent to 1.5 percent. Instead they fell by 1.8 percent, the steepest drop since December 2013. Additionally, May's original 0.9 percent increase was revised down to 0.6 percent. This brought out yet another appearance of the dreaded "U-Word" ("unexpectedly") — accompanied, as usual, by excuses delivered by Victoria Stilwell at Bloomberg News (bolds are mine):
Thanks to year-over-year declines in manufacturing orders, manufacturing shipments, and wholesale sales, along with bloated inventories, apologists for the current condition of the U.S. economy are down to three defenses supposedly demonstrating that all is still really well after yet another rough first quarter (once again excused away as due to supposedly historically awful winter weather).
One of the three is that the housing market, particularly for new homes, is in a genuine recovery. Effective today, we can scratch at least the new-home element of that claim. The Census Bureau told us today that seasonally adjusted new-home sales fell by 7 percent in June, after May's originally strong figure was also revised down by 5 percent. The raw data showed that the number of new homes sold in June — supposedly peak season for new home purchases — was the same as the number sold in February.
On Wednesday night, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC refused to cover the Obama administration’s official unveiling of new regulations that aim to force neighborhoods to diversification or risk losing annual federal funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). As they often do when the networks fail to cover a story, the Fox News Channel (FNC) program Special Report was there to pick up the pieces and provided a full report from White House correspondent Kevin Corke on the plans that HUD says will “reduc[e] disparities in housing choice and access.”
Fox News’s Megyn Kelly began Thursday’s edition of The Kelly File by ripping into President Barack Obama and plans for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to regulate and enforce the diversity of neighborhoods. Kelly blasted the President for being “[t]he man who changed your health care system forever” who’s “now pushing to change your neighborhood” and especially “if Uncle Sam feels it is not inclusive enough.”
The major broadcast networks refused to take notice on Thursday night of plans by President Obama and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to force the diversification of American neighborhoods and particularly those mainly consisting of wealthy Americans. With the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC on the sidelines, the FNC's pecial Report offered a full segment on the regulations that host Bret Baier noted has Republicans “charging that President Obama wants control over who lives in your neighborhood and [that] he’s using the power of the purse strings to pursue it.”
The Census Bureau reported today that sales new homes in the U.S. (seasonally adjusted at an annual rate) plunged sharply in March to 481,000 after hitting a seven-year record level of 543,000 in February.
As has been the case so often, AP reporter Josh Boak didn't look past the seasonally adjusted numbers, and as a result gave the "expert" he quoted a free pass to supply sunnyside-up commentary in his mid-day Wednesday dispatch. He also shakily claimed that "winter storms" were a "likely" major impediment to March sales (bolds are mine):
Apparently, the sheer number of weak to awful economic reports seen during the past month or so finally led Josh Boak at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, to acknowledge that "critical pieces of the economy remain troubled almost six years into the recovery."
Boak's belated timing is interesting, to say the least, given that the Federal Reserve is weighing whether or not to raise interest rates for the first time in six years several months from now.
If someone fools you once, shame on them. If they fool you with the same trick a second time, shame on you. If they "fool" you a third time — well, you must be in on it.
That's my take on Bloomberg News's virtually euphoric reaction to yesterday's new-home sales release from the Census Bureau. The wire service's Shobhana Chandra celebrated how seasonally adjusted December sales were at "the highest level in more than six years." The problem is that the bureau reported the same development two other times in 2014, only to see each improvement disappear in subsequent revisions. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds are mine):