Today’s employment numbers were disastrous. We are losing jobs when we should be gathering steam. Part of the problem is a general lack of confidence and part is a real systemic problem of having no job creation sector to lead us. The weak employment numbers suggest that real estate will have a long hard slog to get out of the slough it’s in. In variably, there will be calls for yet another homebuyer tax credit to stimulate the market. But should we have one?
I would argue that we’ve had enough …

When the hostiles are charging and you’re out of ammo, you start throwing things. That’s where the Federal Reserve is today. Having flooded the financial system with liquidity and pushed interest rates down to zero for banks, they have now moved to pump more funds into the system. Yesterday’s action was the equivalent of throwing stones after all the guns have been fired.
The dirty secret of monetary policy is that it cannot force anything. It persuades, cajoles and uses market channels to try to get banks and other financial institutions to do what …

For months, we’ve been wondering if the housing sector was rebounding or whether the good news was a creature of the tax credit. Well,  the jury is still out, but we have a microphone in the jury room and it doesn’t look good. The May numbers were just plain disappointing, and no amount of it-takes-longer-to-close-a-short-sale explaining away will excuse it.
The weak job numbers for May almost guarantee that this recovery will be very slow and very mild. Without jobs, housing cannot come back and while there’s some good news …

The Labor Department numbers for January came out today, and the most widely followed (and most misleading) employment statistic, the unemployment rate, fell. The bad news was that the economy is still shedding jobs, 20,000 last month. We cannot have any meaningful growth, and we will not have a revived real estate market without job growth. And this we do not yet have. In the State of the Union, the President recognized this and proposed several new programs to create jobs. Most of these have been seconded by the U.S. …

Rather. I’m sick of the term and the way professionals seek to use it. First of all, Facebook, Twitter et al. are channels, carrying only what’s fed into them. As such, they could be used as a marketing device, and in some cases they are. But like all marketing they need a strategy, the positioning of a product or service so that it is perceived to fill the need a consumer has. But these channels are also relationship builders, equivalent to what you do at Rotary, church, the neighborhood association and …

This has been a good week for the economy. The jobs report for November was better than expected (unemployment rate down to 10, only 11,000 jobs lost) and Bank of America is paying back $45 billion in TARP funds to the government. In addition, the Beige Book, the monthly compilation of business condition from the regional Federal Reserve banks, carried remarkably upbeat news. So why are we still feeling so bad? Why was Black Friday so ho-hum? And what will the future hold?
To explain all this, I need to indulge …

The October numbers for employment were disappointing. We lost nearley 120,00 jobs, and the unemployment rate rose above 10. This was the twenty-second consecutive month of job losses, but, in a shorter time frame, the jobs picture is getting less bad each month. We would hope–and I expect–that we will be creating jobs by next summer. All this comes a day after the Congress renewed and expanded the home buyer tax credit, an event that provoked huge rejoicing in the real estate community. But this is not necessarily good news. …