Housing Prices

According to Bloomberg, some homes are not even worth foreclosing on. The banks just let people stay for free.

April 4 (Bloomberg) -- Banks are so overwhelmed by the U.S. housing crisis they've started to look the other way when homeowners stop paying their mortgages.

This tells me that the official foreclosure numbers, housing prices, housing inventory, etc., are all better than they should be.

Also, with 80,000 jobs lost in March. Bloomberg reports that is even worse than it seems at first glance.

The loss of jobs in February was revised to 76,000 from 63,000.

Workers' average hourly wages were 3.6 percent higher than a year earlier, the smallest increase since March 2006.

Gains in government jobs prevented a deeper drop in payrolls last month as private employers cut 98,000 workers, the fourth straight monthly decline.

With tax revenues eroding rapidly, the government will soon be shedding jobs, not adding them. I believe that we are now clearly in recession. It's obvious that the recession has now finally spread from the financial sector to the broad economy.

But don't worry anyone, economic growth will bounce back in the second half of the year! (smirk).