{"id":192755,"date":"2009-02-25T18:15:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-25T23:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/02\/25\/economics-update-273\/"},"modified":"2009-02-25T18:15:00","modified_gmt":"2009-02-25T23:15:00","slug":"economics-update-273","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/02\/25\/economics-update-273\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>More <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/id\/29386291\">brutal numbers on home sales<\/a>, with sales of existing homes falling to a 12 year low.<\/p>\n<p>Note also that existing home sales are becoming a bigger part of home sales in general, as foreclosures and other distressed sales make up a bigger part of the market.<\/p>\n<p>Of course this can&#8217;t compare to the financial putrescence that is AIG, which <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=newsarchive&amp;sid=aV4bXwpSyNXg#\">just failed on an asset sale<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>It wanted to use the proceeds to pay down some of its debt to the US government, but could not because of a <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">lack of bidders<\/span>.  No one wants their crap.<\/p>\n<p>BTW, Ken Lewis&#8217;s gift keeps on giving to Bank of America, because <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/id\/29373658\">Merrill-Lynch lost $15.84 billion in Q4<\/a>, about $500 million more than predicted.<\/p>\n<p>There was an unexpected decline in gasoline stocks that <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/02\/25\/markets\/oil\/index.htm\">drove oil higher today<\/a>, while the poor housing news and the declines in the stock market have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=newsarchive&amp;sid=aItyf6aXAdD0\">driven the dollar up<\/a> as people look for safe havens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>More brutal numbers on home sales, with sales of existing homes falling to a 12 year low. Note also that existing home sales are becoming a bigger part of home sales in general, as foreclosures and other distressed sales make up a bigger part of the market. Of course this can&#8217;t compare to the financial &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1080,973,1135,1004,1088,982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currency","category-economy","category-energy","category-finance","category-real-estate","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192755"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192755\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}