J. McManus at Hanley Wood Construction:
The thing we’re all left to worry about and somehow solve: The main economy has not started working yet.
It’s still stuck. The central banks’ monetary strategies may have been brilliant in reining national economies back from a too-well-imagined abyss. But, the continued erosion of the jobs universe directly correlated to the continued erosion of home values and residential real estate assets tell us the real [non-stimulus] economy is clogged up, still broken.
…
As we’ve written here, we think that Federal and state policy have done about all they’re going to be effective at doing. Recovery is really in the hands of those who survive and resurrect from the ashes.Unity will get home builders farther right now than competing head to head with each other for the few home buyers out there. Foreclosure sales are the No. 1 competition for new home builders, not other new home builders.
A semi-related thought occurs to us on the 174th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Clemens, and it is this. He lost his job as a steamship pilot, which he was very good at and paid good money to learn to do. If he didn’t lose that job–because of the onset of the Civil War–we would not know the work of Mark Twain.
It’s America.
Thankfully, we can still hope that good can come of very troublesome times.