Now that I have returned from my UK trip, where I had the opportunity to present the main story of the Crash Course at the Parliament, at the London School of Economics, and to councillors and members of the Scottish Parliament, I’ve come away with an even stronger sense of the true dimensions of our predicament and what must be done.
We desperately need to start telling ourselves a new story, one that at least fits the known data, and we need to be far more urgent in our preparations for a future that is now upon us. This is not a US or a UK story, but one that applies equally to us all, no matter where we live. It is a global story.
A Bedtime Story
New home sales fell apart in January, tanking to their lowest levels in nearly 50 years. This is not surprising to me. The economy is not doing okay, is not in recovery, and is sliding down a slope of excessive debt and decades of overindulgence and structural imbalances that will take quite some time to repair. And that’s assuming there are no exogenous shocks from oil scarcity or other resource issues along the way.
Despite everything that has transpired to reveal the deep structural flaws in our economy and its main theories, few in the media and government seem to be able to grasp the concept that the story has changed and that all efforts to perpetuate ‘the story’ will only prolong the agony and make things worse.
Let’s examine the evidence:
Economists surprised as new-home sales fall to lowest level in nearly 50 years
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Sales of newly built homes unexpectedly plummeted in January to their lowest level in nearly five decades, providing more evidence of the housing market’s fragility.
Purchases of new single-family homes dropped 11.2 percent in January from December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 309,000, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday. Sales fell in every region except the Midwest, and the raw number of new homes on the market rose for the first time in nearly three years.
“No sugarcoating these numbers,” Mike Larson, an analyst at Weiss Research, wrote in a note to clients. “They stink.”
The figures are the latest in a string of mixed indicators about the housing market’s health and renew questions about whether the federal government should follow through on its plans to soon end initiatives aimed at stimulating sales.
by former_user