Financial Options

It's often said that the three most important words in real estate are «location, location, location». In this week's economic news, the three most important words are «employment, employment, employment.» The monthly jobs report due out Friday is widely expected to show job losses growing in February even beyond January's quick pace and an unemployment report pushing hard at the 8% mark. Leading up to Friday's report is the full gamut of first of the month employment reports from online and offline help wanted advertising, layoffs and the ADP national employment report.

Keep reading →

With the big G-20 financial summit happening over the weekend, the first part of the week will see markets largely moving on the basis of political news. From there, interest will move to the industrial production figures and the Empire State Manufacturing Survey as manufacturing has started to show the effects of the downturn with increased exports unable to offset badly lagging auto sales and exports themselves starting to drop.

Keep reading →

This week markets will have even more reason to focus on geopolitical news and the details of the credit crunch as only three major US monthly economic indicators are released and the first of those is almost a foregone conclusion.

Keep reading →

Existing home sales and new home sales reports are both due out this week, Tuesday and Thursday respectively. Don't look for much more than stability from these numbers, but at this point stability is plenty. This is especially true for new home sales, where new construction has been falling faster even as sales start to stabilize. Even a slight uptick in new home sales would be sufficient to start depleting the excess inventory. A large uptick could boost builder confidence too much and end up adding to the glut.

Keep reading →