Finance Professor Michael Brandl has been blogging his Macroeconomic Updates since 2003. Recently he’s been getting major hits by posting YouTube videos of himself addressing current economic issues like this one on “Defining a Recession:”
As of this post, Brandl’s last five videos, all posted in the last month, have been viewed 4896 times! This is a perfect example of how to cross-promote a blog.
Since the official definition has now been “called” as you correctly mentioned…well after the beginning of a recession…what can be done to get the overall financial and broad based “media” to stop with the panic and fear portion of their reporting…such as “the worst data since the The Great Depression” ???
Also, since 45% of existing home sales in November were foreclosures and short sales that are not arms length transactions, how can the median sales price of those homes be accurately be compared to previous years where the “pool” of sold homes were for the most part actual willing buyer and willing seller transactions.
It seems that statistics that are skewed by this change in the “pool” of sales that have closed should have a footnote when the overall drop in “median home value” is shouted to be -13% year over year, same month previous.
We know home prices have a downward trend but from other more targeted media that I have studied the drop in arms length sales is around -4% to -6% from one year ago and about 11% to 14% from the 2006 peak/bubble.
The recalculation of values is now moving back to Location, Location, Location and I see no reason to panic the country by shouting that all of our residential real estate has declined at these undefined rates.
Comment?
BERT