U.S. existing home sales "unexpectedly" rose in October as low interest rates for mortgages and rising rents led more homebuyers into the market, the National Association of Realtors, reports Reuters.
Sales climbed 1.4 percent to an annual rate of 4.97 million units from September's revised rate of 4.90 million, the NAR said. Keynesian economists in a Reuters poll had expected the annual rate to fall to 4.8 million. They really don't have any clue about the business cycle.
It seems to me like a lot of new builds in Brooklyn that were left as holes in the ground, or were half-built, have started moving.
ReplyDeleteI am a follower of ABC theory, but I also believe the structural deficit, EU collapse, and collapse of the US securities industry (MF Global) is way more important at this time in history.
ReplyDeleteCould you please comment on how you see such things not sending the world into depression?
The sidewalks here in Manhattan are covered in scaffolding and I see more of it going up weekly. The other day I was driving along the west side highway and noticed the large cranes were beginning to dot the skyline again and not just the ones related to the WTC reconstruction.
ReplyDeleteResidential construction started picking up again in Jersey City and Hoboken earlier this year in parts of the area that aren't exactly what you'd call "prime" locations.
It is always funny to watch main-stream economists actually denote an entirely arbitrary number to their forecasts, as if this number has any real relevance to reality.
ReplyDeleteThe causal-realist approach to economics is not a prescriptive, nor is it a predictive science; It is a descriptive science. While we can certainly point out the interventions and their probable results and we can say things like, "we expect x to increase while y decreases due to A", we aren't so foolish to claim that upon date n that such and such statistic will be x,y or z.
The Austrian approach is to first understand the economy and then look to the statistics to see if our understanding is correct. The main stream approach is to take the statistics to form models based upon certain mathematical assumptions, and then make a forecast based upon this (old) data. It has little to do with the nature of human action at all, rather it is a predictive/prescriptive science (the main stream) that is always well behind the curve.
Never hold your breath in the thought that positivist economics will witness the failure of their predictive models and not then recommend prescriptive policies to remedy the discrepancy (or their faulty model). This is what keeps them employed; the perpetuation of the monetary pyramid scheme. If they couldn't keep the governments and "glad-handed" banks in business, they'd be out of a job.
It often makes me wonder how many economists entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Henry Ford employed. I would think that this particular area (economist employees) of their business-model was not a large one, because they were far too busy producing and innovating things that people actually wanted rather than trying to prop up a fragile house of cards.