So much unexpectedness — what ever will we do?
Sorry to keep harping on this, but the issue has gotten under my skin:
New homes sales soar unexpectedly
Sales of newly constructed single-family houses spiked 11% in June to an annualized rate of 384,000 homes.
The gain over May was much greater than expected. A consensus of housing industry analysts had forecast seasonally adjusted sales of 352,000 . . .
Yes, I acknowledge that 384,000 is bigger than 352,000. But year-over-year sales — which is what we should be looking at to account for seasonality — are down 28% from June 2008 to June 2009. So while the raw number did beat experts’ projections . . . it’s still really, really bad.
New homes sales down 28% year over year
That’s the real headline.
We can do better than this. Right?
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More in the same vein:
- Innumeracy in financial reporting?
- From the Department of Actually Informative Headlines . . .
- “I want you to have expected it.”
- Beware “unexpected”!
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One would hope but what’s that line about the triumph of optimism over experience ? To aid in looking at the data yourself you might consider the STL Fed’s FREDII statistical reporting system with which this graph was generated:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?chart_type=line&s1id=HSN1F&s1transformation=pc1#
While YoY was down 27% that is much better than the -43% it was; an improvement to abysmal from catastrophic. Like every other piece of economic data.
FRED can be found here: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/ and, imho, it’s well worth poking at for the straight skinny.
[...] Ranting about the state of financial journalism in this country. [...]
I wonder if comparing the numbers to the pre economic crisis conditions is a great idea. It may look as if we’re not doing so well today if we did that but one must remember that we’re trying to find a balance in spending and not go crazy buying more than we can afford. So, hopefully the amount of buying reflects what it would be under the present condition specially when we’re victims of high inflation.
[...] spare you another rant about how little we should rely on economists’ projections at this point. My point here is to [...]