On Tuesday (8/18/09), news came out that new home construction starts had “unexpectedly” fallen.
However, that number consists of two elements: single family houses and multi-family dwellings.
Taken together, as the number is always reported, home starts fell.
Given a few hours, Bloomberg managed to find the good news amongst the bad and altered its headline and article to read:
U.S. Economy: Single-Family Home Starts Rise for Fifth Month
Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) — American builders broke ground on more single-family homes in July for a fifth straight month as the real-estate industry stabilized further.
Work began on single-family dwellings at a 490,000 annual pace last month, up 1.7 percent from June and the most since October, the Commerce Department reported today in Washington.
It’s quite unusual to cherry-pick a sub-component of a normal report and then make the claim that “the real-estate industry stabilized further.“
The intent here was to spin the sour news into good news. And it’s good news, is it not, that single family home starts have risen for five straight months?
Well, not if you are selling quite a few less than that:
Sales of new one-family houses in June 2009 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 384,000, according to estimates released jointly today by the U.S.
by mobius