Markets in Everything: The Pedal Pub

PedalPub.com

Median Home Price Reaches 20-Month High

One bright spot from today's housing report from the National Association of Realtors is that the median home price in June reached a 20-month high of $183,700, the highest median home price since October of 2008 (see chart above).   Also, existing-home sales in June were 9.8% above last year, which marks the 13th consecutive month of year-to-year sales gains, following at least 30 consecutive months of year-to-year declines.   

One More Reason Wal-Mart Deserves Nobel Prize

NY Times Economix Blog -- "Mr. Mobarak, a Bangladeshi who has advised his country’s government, found that the presence of apparel jobs in Bangladesh appears to bolster school enrollments of girls, especially for young girls (see chart above).

“A doubling of garment jobs causes a 6.71 percent increase in the probability that a 5-year-old girl is in school,” Mr. Mobarak writes in a summary of his findings.

For India, Bangladesh and other developing countries, these findings provide a reason for optimism. Governments in these places are struggling to improve the quality of infrastructure — hard (highways, ports, electricity) and soft (schools, courts, basic governance) – but private forces unleashed by nascent economic reforms and globalization are not standing idly by. They are already changing societies and economies."

MP: Thanks to Milton Recht for sending this along, and for pointing out that Wal-Mart should get some of the credit for this phenomenon by providing a market for all of the clothing produced in countries like Bangladesh. 

California Mortgage Defaults Fall to 3-Year Low

DQNews -- "The number of California homes pushed into the formal foreclosure process between April and June dropped for the fifth consecutive quarter to the lowest level in three years. The declines were greatest in the most affordable areas, where foreclosure activity continues to fall from extremely high levels over the past two years.  Highlights include:

1. A total of 70,051 Notices of Default (NODs) were filed at county recorder offices during the April-to-June period. That was down 13.6% from 81,054 for the prior quarter, and down 43.8% from 124,562 in second-quarter 2009. 

2. Last quarter's total was the lowest since the second-quarter of 2007, when 53,943 NODs were recorded. The peak was in first-quarter 2009 when 135,431 homeowners received foreclosure notices.

3. Foreclosure resales accounted for 36% of all California resale activity last quarter. It was down from a revised 42.5% the prior quarter, and down from 49.9% a year ago. The peak was 57.8 percent in first-quarter 2009."
 
MP: This news about California defaults falling to a three-year low, and to a level in 2010:Q2 of about half of the level in 2009:Q1, suggests that the real estate problems in California and other markets are "slowly fading," and confirms some commentary about the economy in general from Scott Grannis, who writes today that:
 
"The economy's problems are slowly fading.....   Jobs are now being created, albeit slowly, but they are no longer being destroyed. Those who are working are doing just fine, as productivity has been quite healthy. Much of the world is doing pretty well, and some places, like China and India, are growing like weeds. Commodity prices show no sign of flagging demand. The yield curve is very steep, and that makes it easy for bank profits to mushroom; plus, a steep yield curve has been a very reliable predictor of recoveries."

ASA Staffing Index 24% Above Same Wk. Last Year

The weekly American Association Staffing Index for temporary help and contract work continues to show strong gains compared to the same week in the previous year, and the index has increased in every week this year vs. 2009 (see chart abvoe). For the last twelve weeks (starting April 19) the weekly gains have been above 20%, and for the last 20 weeks (starting Feb. 15) the gains have been above 10%. Compared to last year, the ASA Index was 24% higher during the 28th week of this year (July 5 - 11 this year).

High Stakes Test: Can Big Government Successfully Organize the Dynamic, Information Age Economy?

David Brooks in today's NY Times:

"When historians look back on the period between 2001 and 2011, they will be amazed that a nation that professed to hate bureaucracy produced so much of it.

First, Democrats passed a health care law. This law created 183 new agencies, commissions, panels and other bodies.  Democrats also passed a financial reform law. The law that originally created the Federal Reserve was a mere 31 pages. The Sarbanes-Oxley banking reform act, passed in 2002, was only 66 pages. But the 2010 financial reform law was 2,319 pages, an intricately engineered technocratic apparatus. As Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute noted, the financial reform law is seven times longer than the last five pieces of banking legislation combined.

Once again, government experts were told to take a complex, decentralized system — in this case the financial markets — and impose rules, rationality and order. The law creates one über-panel, the Financial Stability Oversight Council. It directs government experts to write rules in 243 separate areas.

This progressive era amounts to a high-stakes test. If the country remains safe and the health care and financial reforms work, then we will have witnessed a life-altering event. We’ll have received powerful evidence that central regulations can successfully organize fast-moving information-age societies.

If the reforms fail — if they kick off devastating unintended consequences or saddle the country with a maze of sclerotic regulations — then the popular backlash will be ferocious. Large sectors of the population will feel as if they were subjected to a doomed experiment they did not consent to. They will feel as if their country has been hijacked by a self-serving professional class mostly interested in providing for themselves.

If that backlash gains strength, well, what’s the 21st-century version of the guillotine?"

LEIs/CEIs: U.K., China, Spain, France and Germany

Over the last week, The Conference Board has released leading economic indexes (LEIs) and coincident economic indexes (CEIs) for the following five countries, which all registered increases (or stayed the same) in May:

1. The U.K. leading economic index increased by 0.3% in May to 102.4, following gains of 0.6% in April and 1.0% in March. The Coincident Economic Indicator (CEI) for the U.K. increased by 0.1% in May.

2. China's leading economic index increased by 0.8% in May, and China's CEI increased 0.9% in May, following a 1.4% increase in April and a 0.5% increase in March.

3. The Conference Board LEI for Spain remained unchanged in May after increasing in April and the Coincident Economic Index (CEI) increased 0.1% in May.

4. The LEI for France increased 0.3% in May and the CEI increased 0.2%.

5. Germany's LEI increased 0.5% in May and its CEI increased 0.5%.

Bottom Line: Steady and positive growth is ongoing in all of these countries, and can be expected to continue in the future.