February 25, 2008




IMPEACH BUSH




IMPEACH CHENEY



TELL ME A FREE MARKET STORY



You wonder if conservatives tell traditional fairy tales like "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" or "Jack and the Beanstalk." Maybe they opt instead for the story of the free market. You let business run free from regulation and all is right and good in the world, according to that fairy tale. We see once again how lack of government regulation has led to the housing meltdown. You don't have to be an economist to see the absolute lunacy of people getting mortgages that were almost certain to go bad in a few years. This article by Martin Crutsinger is at www.sfgate.com:




Sales of existing homes fell for the sixth straight month in January, dropping to the slowest sales pace on record. Median home prices were also down and many analysts predicted further price declines in the months ahead given high levels of unsold homes.



The National Association of Realtors said Monday that sales of single-family homes and condominiums dropped by 0.4 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.89 million units. That was the slowest sales pace, going back to 1999, and was seen as evidence that the steepest slump in housing in a quarter-century has yet to hit bottom.



The median price of a home sold in January slid to $201,100, a drop of 4.6 percent from a year ago. Particularly alarming, analysts said, was the fact that the inventory of unsold homes jumped to a 10.3 months' supply, meaning it would take that long to sell the 4.19 million homes on the market at the January sales pace.



That was up from 9.7 months in December and just below a two-decade high of 10.5 months hit in October. During the peak of the housing boom in 2005, the supply of homes relative to sales stood at 4.5 months.