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The Big Picture

All this week, we are looking at the Housing Recovery theme, challenging assumptions that make up the bullish argument. Monday, we began with Debunking the Housing Recovery Story , starting with Shadow inventory. On Tuesday, it was Reality Check on Home Affordability . Yesterday, we looked at the Problem With Home Prices .

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/22/2012 - 18:39 Auto Sales CDS China Consumer Sentiment Crude David Rosenberg Global Economy Housing Starts Iran Israel Merrill Michigan NAHB NFIB Payroll Data Personal Income recovery Rosenberg University Of Michigan Back in early 2011, even as the global economy was at best flatlining, the one goalseeked explanation to justify a levitating stock market (which was rising solely due to the short-term effect of transitory QE2 liquidity), was soaring corporate profitability (which only lasted as long as companies could trim some residual SG&A fat; they have now cut into the bone in terms of layoffs). This time around, with corporate margins having peaked, there had to be some other validation to explain away the "narrative" of the latest bout of central bank infused stock market levitation: it just happened that this time it was once again that old faithful, and always wrong, justification - decoupling.

zero hedge | on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for ev

Pragmatic Capitalism

There are many reasons why gold is still our favorite investment – from inflation fears and sovereign debt concerns to deeper, systemic economic problems. But let’s be honest: It’s been rising for over 11 years now, and only the imprudent would fail to think about when the run might end.

Angry Birds publisher Rovio Entertainment has acquired its fellow Finnish game development house, Futuremark Games Studio, in order to get some new talent.

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Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

pkedrosky Conclusive proof that bits roll downhill: Outbound b/w from Mammoth (el. 8000 ft) is 6x inbound. And both suck. twitpic.com/971b5s 11 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

Bespoke Investment Group - Think BIG

Seasonally adjusted jobless claims (357K) fell this week to their lowest level since April 2008. Even more impressive, however, was the fact that for the current week, non-seasonally adjusted (NSA) claims (319K) fell to their lowest levels since 2007. As shown below, the last time NSA claims were lower than 319K in the first week of April was back in 2007. Going back to 2000, the average NSA initial claims level for the current week is 362K, which is well above the current level of 319K. Not to beat a dead horse, but back in December and January when NSA claims were much higher than the seasonally adjusted numbers, there were a lot of bears claiming that the divergence between the two was a 'troubling' sign. We pointed out at the time, however, that NSA claims were always much higher than seasonally adjusted claims at that time of year.

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Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/

Today I'm going to share a personal struggle with you. This is news I've largely kept to a small circle of close friends over the past few years and is difficult to talk about. The time has now come to enlist the support of a wider community, and perhaps together, we can make a difference. Running this site and publishing commentary as frequently as I do demands a tremendous amount of my attention.

On a nationwide basis, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own or guarantee 60 percent of the mortgages outstanding, but they account for only 29 percent of seriously delinquent loans, obviously a much lower proportion than their share of the market. Even though the Enterprises have a smaller share of seriously delinquent loans than other market participants, they account for just over half of all Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP modifications. Between HAMP modifications and their own proprietary loan modifications, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have completed more than 1.1 million loan modifications since the fourth quarter of 2008. It has been well-publicized that there is one form of loan modification that FHFA has not embraced, that being principal forgiveness .