Real Housing Prices Stabilizing … or Falling

Case-Shiller through July, Zillow through August.

Figure 1: Case-Shiller 20 city home price index (blue, left log scale), Zillow forecast of Case-Shiller August value (blue +, left log scale), and Zillow single-family home prices (brown, right log scale). Source: S&P via FRED, Zillow, BLS, and author’s calculations.

As Calculated Risk notes, Zillow makes predictions for the Case-Shiller index. They forecast the August 2019 m/m growth rate (not annualized) in the 20 city composite at -0.1% (roughly -1.2% on an annualized basis). The forecast is shown in Figure 1 as a “+”.

New home sales depict a much more optimistic picture, as Calculated Risk discusses.

Is California in Recession? (Part XVIII)

June employment figures are out. Time to re-evaluate this assessment from over one and a half years ago in Political Calculations that California was in recession.

Going by these [household survey based labor market] measures, it would appear that recession has arrived in California, which is partially borne out by state level GDP data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. [text as accessed on 12/27/2017]

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