Wednesday 24 September 2008

US home sales much worse than expected

What happened to all this talk about the US housing market bottoming out? According to the FT:

"New data on Wednesday showed that existing home sales dropped by 2.2 per cent in August, which was much worse than expected and highlighted the continuing downturn in the US housing market. The median existing home price fell 9.5 per cent to $203,100, the sharpest drop on record."

That doesn't sound much like a turning point.

5 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Not one stone shall stand upon another!

Alice Cook said...

Mark,

Indeed!!!

alice

Anonymous said...

Turning point? Have you noticed that people have started saying "inflection point" when they mean "turning point"? Rather pretentious, don't you think? And wrong.

Anonymous said...

Well to be fair, an inflection point does allow a drop before and after - which is more accurate in this case...

Anonymous said...

An inflection implies a turning point in the rate of change of the variable, not in the variable itself. Anyway, I think it is pure pretension - they think it sounds more high-falutin'.