Editor’s Note: The following report is excerpted from Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert, the premium online newsletter published by the current No. 1 best-selling author, WND staff writer and columnist. Subscriptions are $99 a year or $9.95 per month for credit card users. Annual subscribers will receive a free autographed copy of “The Obama Nation,” the blueprint for Obama’s first term in office.
According to new industry data, the U.S. housing market is collapsing at a rapid rate not seen since the Great Depression, Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert reports.
Sales of single-family homes, both new and existing, dropped in November by 7.6 percent. It is the largest decline since January 1989, to an annual rate of 4.43 million. Also, the median home resale price dropped 13 percent in November, to $181,300 from $208,000 a year ago, the worst plummet since records began in 1968 and the largest decline since the 1930s, according to the National Association of Realtors.
“Dismal financial reports strongly suggest the crisis in the housing market will persist, if not deepen, in 2009,” Corsi wrote.
Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight., told Bloomberg, “Housing is still in freefall.”
Even though mortgage rates dropped after the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to record lows near zero percent,” the New York Times reported, “economists said that housing would continue to lag as unemployment increases and the spiral of slumping consumer spending and waning industrial growth continues.”
The pool of unsold homes grew to 4.2 million last month, and the Times estimates it will take 11.2 months “to burn off the excess inventory.”
In November 2007, there were 4.27 million homes on the market, approximately the same number available today.
Inventories of unsold homes have hardly budged in the last year, and most real estate analysts do not expect any improvement in sales of existing homes until the middle of next year, at best, Corsi wrote.
Now Red Alert’s author, whose books “The Obama Nation” and “Unfit for Command” have topped the New York Times best-sellers list, predicts the home market will continue deteriorating in 2009, presenting the incoming Obama administration with a problem that will not be solved by a one-time economic stimulus packaged as a “tax rebate,” regardless of how large the dollar giveaway.
Red Alert’s Jerome Corsi received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in political science in 1972. For nearly 25 years beginning in 1981, he worked with banks throughout the United States and around the world to develop financial services marketing companies to assist banks in establishing broker/dealers and insurance subsidiaries to provide financial planning products and services to their retail customers. In this career, Corsi developed three different third-party financial services marketing firms that reached gross sales levels of $1 billion in annuities and equal volume in mutual funds. In 1999, he began developing Internet-based financial marketing firms, also adapted to work in conjunction with banks.
In his 25-year financial services career, Corsi has been a noted financial services speaker and writer, publishing three books and numerous articles in professional financial services journals and magazines.
For more on the future of home sales and for financial guidance during difficult times, read Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert, the premium, online intelligence news source by the WND staff writer, columnist and author of the New York Times No. 1 best-seller, “The Obama Nation.”
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