Zombie Housing Market Chronicles – Fed Fails Again To Stimulate A Housing Recovery
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
02/22/2012
While today the association of real estate advertising agents known as the NAR will tell us that the home market is improving – an economic observation which we will completely ignore as any data out of the NAR is now proven to be manipulated and fraudulent, a far better indication of the ongoing implosion in the housing market, and more importantly – the sheer powerlessness of the Fed to do anything about it – came out of the latest weekly Mortgage Brokers Association, which showed that refi applications were down 4.8% W/W, while purchases slid 2.9%, after collapsing 8.4% in the past week. This has taken the Purchase Application index back to the September lows, which just happens to be the lowest print in 16 years! And while this in itself would be ok if not exactly good, it took place at a time when the 30 year mortgage rate was down to all time record lows! In other words, Bernanke’s sole prescription to fix the broken housing market diagnosis – low mortgage rates, has now been proven to be a complete disaster, even as Obama does everything in his power to get debt repudiation for deadbeats (at the expense of everyone else of course) and fails. So: what’s the next plan?
One would think record low mortgage rates would be good for the housing market: one would be dead wrong.
The Rest…HERE
